Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life. What a cliche, huh?
Look at it from the point of view of a person who just won the bazillion dollar lottery, married the sweetest high school sweetheart in the world, and found out that wild idea to help regular cars get a hundred miles per gallon really works and the country’s going to adopt it as the standard and they’re making an official holiday after that person’s name.
Now look at it from the point of view of a man who was successfully framed for running a human slavery ring, and his wife saw the evidence and couldn’t believe him anymore, and whose children were told they needed to say goodbye because their daddy is leaving on a trip for the rest of his life, and a guard is putting him in his prison cell saying that phrase.
Two different pictures. One truth. People who say your attitude changes everything are not completely accurate. There are other forces at work that affect you, aren’t there? Other people have plans in which you are only a bit-part actor, and as soon as your scene is over then they are through with you.
Circumstances are real. Anybody saying differently is either ignorant or dishonest. Yet, there’s a free-will inside each of us, and the breath of life still breezes through us. There is a myth about when the ancient Greek gods gave mankind Pandora’s box. One myth says it had lots of evil things in it and when she opened it they all entered into the lives of mankind. Another myth says it was a box full of wonderful things, but she opened it and they all fluttered away. But both stories agree that Hope hung around.
In the real world, God’s Word says that three things still abide: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. But that doesn’t discount faith and hope, it just elevates love.
Keep hope. If you’re entering something like a prison cell in your life, you would never look up without hope, and maybe…just maybe…they left the window open and you can escape your own personal hell. If you did invent a cure for cancer, or pollution, or bad gas mileage, look up with hope! You need to give credit to Whom it is due because He’s the Great Idea-Giver anyway, isn’t He?
I don’t know how long this thread of life is, and I can’t see the end, and yes: I can picture the person who says when they reach the end of their rope they’ll make a knot and hold on. I see life as more of a tightrope walk than repelling down a rope. I’ll get to the other side when my journey is over.
Until then, this is only the first day, and you know as well as I do that if we’re just beginning this ‘…Rest of your life,” then we have a lot of work to do, so let’s get crackin’!
