Last evening I went to bed early as I often do, and listened to music on my head phones.

My mind drifted to the future as I thought about how we all grow older, and what we now experience as families very soon changes because of the cycle of life.

It can be so easy and comfortable to think that our loved ones and family members will somehow remain in their present state with us indefinitely.

It’s normal to think that our present experience in time and the moment that we now live in, will remain with us and not change.

But life goes on as we well know. Children grow up and eventually leave us. Our parents at some point leave this world, and we live our lives without them.

I began to get melancholy at first as I thought about these things, but then I remembered back and realized that life is always moving forward. The present quickly becomes the future and we simply just can’t hold onto it.

We’ve heard it said many times that we should make the most of the time that we now have. It’s very true.

Ecclesiastics tell us that it is better to go to the house of mourning, rather than to the house of feasting. For when we learn to number our days, then we acquire a heart of wisdom.

“It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth,” Ecclesiastics 7:2-4.

We think about a young child who runs and plays, learning how to fly a kite, or wanting to fish. We look at the pictures and the videos of them cutting up a pumpkin and taking the seeds out of it.

And then before we know it, they are dating and their mind and heart is involved with other things. Such are the things of this life.

The greatest things we can give to our children are roots and wings. And yet perhaps the hardest things to give them are wings.

But they need to learn how to fly, just like the mother eagle must teach her young eaglets this very lesson. Then when the time comes for them to learn how to fly, they won’t be falling to the ground below, but in time, they will soar on the currents, far above the canyons, and the mountains.

I used to sit by a river in the town that I grew up in. I sat and watched the currents of the water and thought about how it traveled around the bend and went on miles ahead.

At one point my friends and I traveled on a canoe down that river finding all kinds of hidden inlets and secret places.

It was summer time, and the leaves of the old cottonwood and willow trees branched over the water and formed a canopy for us to travel underneath.

And now the river continues in its travels, winding its way into the many different avenues of our own lives and circumstances.

Children grow up. Our teachers are now in their nineties and perhaps have long left us. Some of our children have children of their own, and they are forming their own memories like a quilt that one day will be brought out and looked at.

But the river continues and eventually flows into the sea — and there all of the memories and things that we have experienced in life, are held in its space.

There The Father Himself, holds those things in the palms of His Hands, and sets them upon a shelf.

Amen.

Selah,
~ Stephen Hanson

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Stephen Hanson of In His Truth Ministries came to The LORD is a special way in 1975 and has prophesied regularly since. In these end-time birthing pangs we are reminded that judgment must first begin with the household of God. Will we be prepared and ready?
Stephen is a full-time Artist of original architectural, landscape, portrait, still-life and spiritual oil paintings, available at StephenHansonArtist.com

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