Ok. So I read Dell's blog the other day about not wasting your life, and it got me thinking about it again. I have thought about that particular subject on many occasions and (unfortunately) forgotten about that subject for long stretches of time. this time I would rather not forget.

I've been asking myself lots of questions since yesterday, and this is what I thought: When determining if you're wasting your life or not it would be wise to first identify exactly what would cause your life to be a waste, and secondly determine what would make it worth it's while. When I asked myself what wasting life is I realized that it is any failure to spend our short amount of alloted time on this earth in any other practice than glorifying God and enjoying Him forever, which would be the very thing that would make our lives NOT a waste. According to that standard we've all wasted our lives. We've all sinned. We've all sought to put the gift before the Giver. We've all spent our time in self-enjoyment, self-worship, and self-glorification. Yet what are we that we should be glorified? Where is the value of man that he should merit anything? This isn't why we're here. Dumb as it is that I heard this on a comedy show on tv (there's some of my wasted time), one character said, "there are millions of stars, and millions of planets in the the universe and they revolve around a single point...... and that point is not you.". It's true. The sun doesn't rise in the morning because I tell it to. The stars don't shine because of my power. Yet I live my life as if time had no claim on me, as if death were no issue, and as if, and though we don't say it, if we searched the darkest corners of our own hearts we'd see, we think that WE are the gods. When we spend our lives on anything less than God's glory or our enjoyment of Him, we're saying that we are sufficient on our own. That our glory matters more than His. That we can find enjoyment and satisfaction in ourselves. It's a scary picture, and one that I paint for myself far too infrequently. It's not that I want this to be the state of my life...but I forget. I SO quickly forget. I'm SO quickly blinded by what I want. But what I want won't satisfy. What I want will leave me wondering if there might have been more that I could have gained from this life before I die. So now we've got to move to what will be a satisfying, unwasted life......

There is only one way to not waste our lives. He must be the treasure, He must be the aim, and His must be the glory. We need to lift our eyes up from muddy paths of life to see the One who is infinitely worthy of our Lives, infinitely worthy of our praise, and who infinitely loves to shower Himself on us. For He is the only thing that satisfies, He is the only thing that turns unworthy, wasted lives into beautiful songs sung for His glory. And that's what our lives can be. That's what I long for my life to be. I'd like to look back on my life one day and know that the time that I had was spent on the one thing worth spending time on: Him.

Now here's where talking meets action. what am I going to do about it? what are you going to do about it? We live in a world that loves to waste life, even our own nature would urge us to waste our lives. But here's the question. will I go away and forget again? I don't want to, but it has to be more than just not wanting to. People have done terrible things though they "didn't want to". Often that terrible thing is the easy way out though the hard way will have less consequences. We need to be committed to it. We have to be willing to forsake what we want to do what He wants. And we need His help most of all. We need to pray daily and ask that we would be aware of what we are doing, how we're spending our time, and why we're spending it the way we are. We need to soak ourselves in His word. We need to help each other. It's not a one step solution, it's a lifetime of war against what our flesh most wants, with what our souls most need as the goal. Wasting or not wasting our lives is a lot less complicated than a lot of more complicated things, but it's by far the hardest to achieve and I think there are only a handful who have done it. The more fierce the struggle, the sweeter the crown, and as for me, I want to forsake the world in this life and make Christ the treasure I seek.