Watching the world pass me by

Three Crosses Ministries

Does it seem to you that it was just the other day the world was a bit less complicated? I know the place we call Earth where we briefly reside has been complicated to the people who lived in the past. One can only imagine the grumblings of how the world was changing too fast when the wheel was invented or the telephone and electricity. Gone were the days of the outhouse when people got civilized. Today, most kids can’t believe the telephone was attached to the wall with a cord. Time waits for no one.

I don’t remember the exact time of my life that I realized I was growing up faster than I wanted to grow. It seems like yesterday that Elementary school was in my rearview mirror and Junior High was here... then it was gone. As a child, I felt I had all the time in my life just having fun playing games and watching Kitterick or Gilligan’s Island after school. I didn’t have a care in the world except looking forward to the next Christmas. However, along the way I went from living the simple life of a young child that had the world and the woods behind the house at his fingertips to longing for the time that I get my driver’s license. I started this odyssey of future-seeking when I was about twelve and kept looking forward in multi-year increments. I couldn’t wait until I was sixteen and could travel faster than my bike when I finally got a car. I couldn’t wait until I was eighteen so I could vote. Coincidentally, the legal drinking age at that time was that age as well! Immediately I looked toward twenty-one and I could call myself a man. I couldn’t wait to get married and have kids and climb the ladder of success. Suddenly, I realized that my kids had kids and a number of my older relatives were passing away at an alarming rate. I came face to face with the fact that I am now the patriarch of the family.

I was always amazed at how the world seemed to be speeding past me with all this technology and culture shifts. I felt that I’ve just been watching the world pass me by. Now I wondered if maybe, just maybe, that I have been living too fast for the world around me. I ceased to enjoy the beauty and the blessings that God had surrounded me with. Instead of living for the moment I lived for the next joy in my life. Being in such a hurry to get from here to there and from there to over yonder, I missed God’s goodness and gifts that He provided daily. Slow down and smell the roses in your life. Those roses are your family, friends and the one that brung ya to the dance… God. Ecclesiastes 3:11-“Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”