Welcome back, friends. We’ve been talking a lot lately about the importance of focusing our efforts on enjoying the present. We’ve talked about Turning the Simple into the Extraordinary, that NOW is the time to ENJOY LIFE, and that wise old Solomon commanded us to Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.
As much as we might like to hope and plan for a better tomorrow, the only thing that is certain is that we are alive right now – after that, there are no guarantees. Certainly, we can and should do our best to put ourselves and our families in a position where the future looks bright, but it’s important to understand that, in spite of our best efforts, things can go wrong. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon delivered one of my all time favorite observations about this when he said (Eccl 9:11)…
“The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.”
The best teams in sports don’t always win (sometimes the ball just bounces the ‘wrong’ way) – that’s why they play the games, right?
The best person for the job doesn’t always get it (sometimes the position is really already “filled” by the boss’s choice and job is only posted for HR compliance purposes).
And the sometimes you suffer from a streak of just downright bad luck.
That’s life.
That’s why it’s all the more important to really take the time ENJOY your life when things are going well!
In the article called No Winter that Lasts Forever, we talked about the ‘seasons’ of life – and about how experiencing the bad times makes us appreciate the good times all the more. The takeaway for us all is to recognize that we don’t really know when those bad times are coming and we may not have much power to stop them. But one thing we do have power over is doing our best to make the most of TODAY – I hope you’ll do just that.