Gods gift to you today!

God’s gift to you today by Arnold Groenewald

Imagine for a moment that you go to the ATM and discover that someone has deposited $86 400, or Rand or Euro, or whatever currency you are working with, into your personal bank account. Now I have your undivided attention! What a great thought. There is no limitation on what you can do with the money, you can do with it whatever your heart desire. You can spend it any way you want.

There is only one catch. You cannot save any of it. The money that is still left in your account at the end of the day when you go to sleep, will be gone tomorrow. You would go nuts, wouldn’t you? I know I would! (not to mention my wife!)

Well that is probably not gonna happen. Wishful thinking, a very nice dream. But there is a very valuable lesson in this idea for all of us. The saying goes: Time is money, and it’s the truth. Two of the most valuable resources we as human beings have are money and time, and we tend to treat them the same way. You can spend, save, waste and invest money, and you can also spend, save, waste and invest time.

But there is one huge difference, it is possible to know how much money you have left, but none of us knows how much time we’ve got left. You can also get more money when it is finished, but you cannot get more time. The thing that struck me the most while reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch was that one day you might discover, like Randy, that you have much less time than you thought.

Leo Bascaglia refers to a heading in a newspaper that read: No one ever came out of this life alive! Life is like a coin, you can spend it anyway you want, but you can spend it only once. Then it’s over. Every day God gives us 86 400 seconds, deposited into your account in the Bank of Human Existence. It’s God’s free gift to you. How are you spending it?

Are you wasting thousands of valuable God given seconds every day watching television, hanging around in a shopping mall, being on autopilot, just doing nothing? And then you wonder why you haven’t achieved anything significant with your life so far. You’ve got to start turning it around!

I remember the first time I listened to John C. Maxwell, about twenty years ago. He said: “Tell me what you want to achieve with your life, share your goals with me, and then allow me to walk with you for one full day, from the moment you wake up in the morning, until you go to bed tonight. At the end of that one day I will be able to tell you whether you will achieve your goals or not.

It is all about the way you spend every single day of your life. This specific day is the most important one of them all. Because what you do with this day determines were you will be tomorrow. Will you be closer to your destiny, or will you be just as far from it than you were yesterday. The secret lies in these 86 400 seconds that God have blessed you with today. Today can make a difference to the rest of your life, or it can be just another day, wasted like most of the others.

We must stop counting the days, and make the days count. Today is a gift, that’s why they call it: The Present. Start today, decide to make the most of the 86 400 seconds you’ve been given today, and make them count. If you are lucky God will give you another 86 400 tomorrow, but you cannot be sure about that, for now, it’s all you’ve got.

I want to end this article with a quote form Henry Ford: “It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste”

Until next time. Carpe Diem! Seize the moment.

Arnold Groenewald