Your One LifeSample

Day Seven: You Have Today

For some of us, the first step we need to take toward crafting a renewed life is to start enjoying the moments that God sends our way. God gave us, as people created in His image, the capacity to experience moments and also to create moments. 

The Gospels give us a wonderful example of this. 

While Jesus is having dinner at Simon’s house, an uninvited woman barges in and approaches Jesus. She is carrying an expensive bottle of perfume. She breaks the seal and pours the perfume on Jesus’s head. 

Luke 7:38 says, “Then she knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them.” 

Can you sense the emotion of this scene? This is a moment. It’s a breach of social custom and etiquette for this woman to enter the house of a Pharisee. But she bursts into the room with a spontaneous, awkward, unrestrained, uninhibited, lavish, excessive expression of love. 

I love the impulsiveness and spontaneity of this scene. We have all felt the urge to do something lavish and “over the top” for someone we love. But more times than not we push the urge back down, talk ourselves out of it, choose to play it safe, and get on with our to-do list. We miss the chance to watch people light up because we took the risk to create a moment.

Jesus says she has done a good thing: not a careless thing, not an irresponsible thing, not a wasteful thing. She has done a good thing in seizing this moment to create a moment. She saw an opportunity to express her devotion and she grabbed it. And now her story lives on thousands of years later. 

Listen, my friend: you don’t know what lies ahead or how long you’ll be here. You have today. You have right now. You have one life. You have this moment. You can’t do everything. You can’t meet every need. But you can capture and create moments. Do what you can with this one life you have to live.

Are you soaking up and absorbing moments, or are you always in such a hurry that you blow past the moments that actually make life worth living? What would those closest to you say?