You get plenty of emails, right? To manage the daily onslaught, you have identified many email originators as time wasting and frivolous. Those are sent to directly to your spam folder and are never seen by you.
You have just received a new email with “Deadline” in the subject box. You open this email and the text reads, “You will die next Wednesday at 1130.” This one did not go to Spam because the originator was God. What do you do?
Before you can answer that question, you go through a series of emotions.
Disbelief. “This must be a mistake. I am too young. I go to church on Christmas and, usually, on Easter Sunday. It must have been meant for someone else. We can do a deal. I will be good. I am not ready.”
But you check the addressee. Yup, that is your name. No change. It was, indeed, meant for you.
Next, sorrow and grief. “Oh noooo. I like it here. What will my dog think? Who will take him for walks and feed him. He will miss me and I will not have been able to explain my absence.”
You cry. Your grief is overwhelming. But your tears change nothing.
Then the final emotion: anger. “This is not fair. I don’t deserve this. This should be happening to someone else, not me.”
You kick the door, you pound the wall. But your anger changes nothing.
Exhausted, you are forced to accept the veracity of God’s email. You will die next Wednesday at 1130.
Back to the original question. You have been given a deadline (pun intended). What do you do?
First, you recognize that your time is limited. There are dozens of things that you would like to do; but you are forced to identify the two or three most important, the things that absolutely must be done before Wednesday. You prioritize.
As you do that, you realize how many meaningless things are on your list. The reality of your deadline forces you shed those irrelevant and trivial things. You focus on what matters.
There is a lesson here. Just because we have not received God’s email, it doesn’t mean that our time is endless. Our time is, in fact, limited. We need to set goals and continually monitor our progress if we are to achieve our true potential. (See the letters “G” and “V” in the Youth Version of my Responsibility Workbook Series).
Use your time wisely. You never know when you will get God’s email.