When I was young, a friend and I imagined a device like a watch, that would show you exactly how long it would be until you died. Then we thought about the impact of our lives on that clock: every cigarette would take minutes or hours away from the time you had, every hamburger, every time you worried it would take time off of your life… everything.

We decided that the expiry watches weren’t such a great idea after all.

The lesson the thought experiment gave us was the same lesson that Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album offered, in “Time”: there was no time to waste, that time marched on whether we were ready to participate or not; there is no practice round, there is no warm-up.

We are barely relevant to the time we have. We can affect it, to be sure, through choices we make – and such choices can be terminal. (“Sure, I’d love to text my American Idol votes while driving in the rain to McDonald’s! What could go wrong?”)

We are certainly powerless to extend the span of our days – the best we can do is to be able to make that span as full as God allows it to be. We can limit how much is taken from our lives; we cannot add to our time on this Earth.

If we are barely relevant to the time we have, how much less relevant are we to the coming of the Day of the Lord? Why do we worry about things that we cannot affect? Why do we not strive to make the most of what we have, while we have it?