P is for Passage of Time

Recently I re-read Bridget Jones’s Diary. I first read this book in 1997 when I was twenty-five years old. (Incidentally, now the newest Bridget Jones book is out addressing Bridget’s life in her fifties!) It was a strange thing to read this book again at the age of forty-two, as it reminded me of how quickly time passes. When I first read Bridget Jones, I had just returned from living in England the first time, and I was very depressed. I’d wanted to stay there, marry someone English, and live happily ever after. My quest for this elusive husband severely distracted me, threw me off-course from my Christian walk, and wasted many valuable years when I could have been serving God as a single person.

I didn’t marry until I was thirty-four, and I now look back on my wedding day in disbelief. Was that really seven and a half years ago? Time has flown by again. I realize that one day very soon I will be looking down the path I’ve traveled unable to believe that I’m sixty-five, and where has the time gone?

These thoughts about time passing make me cognizant of my own mortality and the inevitable. During my short visit here on earth, I don’t want to waste time that could be spent serving God in whatever way he desires. I don’t want to look back regretting squandered opportunities from my forties as I do from my twenties. The passage of time keeps me in check when I find myself striving to hurry it along for my own purposes.




There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die...
   

 Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account.

^{--Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2, 15 (NIV)}