| Ephesians 5:16-17 – “Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don’t act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do.” |
Some words are easily overlooked. I want us to consider a little word that moves so quickly we miss it. It is like vapor off the cup of hot coffee–it appears and disappears. That’s the word “now.” When is now? When does it stop being now and become now? These are not the ravings of a weird mind (although you might disagree.)
Have you considered the “now” of life? No one is for sure where our word “now” came from. If you feel the leaves and work your way down the trunk into the roots of the word, it goes back to a time before Christ, to Old Persian and even Sanskrit. Almost all old languages pronounced it differently than today. It was pronounced as “new” and perhaps it was a corruption of the word new. And it fits because when it is now, the moment is new.
In Genesis 22, Abraham took his son to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him as God commanded. But at the appropriate moment, the angel grabbed the knife hand of Abraham to stop its downward thrust.
Then God told him: “He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” (Genesis 22:12)
Since no one knows the mind of God, we are not sure what he meant and it twists the mind into a knot. How could God not have known? But in the “now” it was apparent. Things come to light “now.”
How long is now? Believe it or not, psychologists had to find something to write doctoral theses so one decided to measure how long “now” lasted. From those studies, now is defined as a space of 1-2 seconds that appear and then becomes another now moment.
It doesn’t sound like much. But there are many things you can do in the now of life.
You can say thank you.
You can say, I love you.
You can say, I’m sorry.
You can put an arm around the hurting.
You can laugh with joy.
Never discount the now, for it is full of possibilities.
So today, what will you do with the nows of today?
-Robert G. Taylor-
robertgtaylor.com
