Where is your walk?

Recently I have been thinking about where my walk is leading. You know, my walk in life, where is it headed? I am not going to get into any details here, instead I am going to throw out a bunch of questions based on my own thoughts and my own observations. People near me, people whom I have interacted with and around, family members, friends, and more have impacted this thought process recently. Some of these words I write today have been swirling in my mind for weeks, some will hit me as I get through this.

So, where are you headed? Do you know? Do you care? Do you have a plan? Are you going in circles because your focus is on someone or something that is as unstable as you are? Is it someone else’s fault, because you don’t want to own the decisions you make everyday? Do you even think about such things?

Are you walking towards God? Are you walking away, or are you hiding along the way? Are you walking towards God after being gone for some amount of time? Are you ready to face the responsibilities that an errant walk from God will ultimately reveal? Can you walk and talk at the same time? Would you consider including God in the conversation if you haven’t already?

Are you walking with your spouse? Are you nervously slinking around in the shadows, peeking in the windows (so to speak) to see what your spouse is up to because priorities, or communications, or both, are way out of whack? What do you want in a relationship with your spouse? What have you done to get it? Do you have more to give? What are you waiting for? Isn’t it the most important relationship you could ever have with another mortal? Are you walking hand in hand with your spouse because you’ve put God, each other, and the desire to love in their proper places?

Are you in harmony with yourself? Do you look in the mirror and like what you see? Can you look yourself in the eye and talk honestly with yourself? Do you lie to yourself? Did you decide to be happy today? Did you know you could? Do you stretch truths in conversations with others, and tell yourself the truth? Do you want to improve on that? Do you have faith in yourself? Do you believe in anything bigger than yourself?

How are you with your family? Have you made a list of the people you want around you when your days are coming to an end? If you haven’t, will you? Do you know when it’s all going to end? Do you care if it all ends tomorrow? Would you walk in a different direction if it was going to be the end of your days within the next year? Are you walking towards your family? With your family? Away from your family? Did your family make it onto the list of people you were making? Who else would you want with you at the end? Are you close to them now? What will you do to make sure those people are close to you before you’re close to the end? Did you know that the clock is already ticking? Really?

I ask myself these things and thousands more. I don’t always like my answers. I don’t always like my direction. I work at it. I pray about it. I ask others whom are far wiser than myself for advice, I ask for guidance, I ask them if they’ll share their experiences with me so that I may learn. I observe, while trying to be much better at both listening and observing. I walk too. Where is your walk?

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We Span

Born welcome.
Life separation.
Death gathers.

Two sides of Time

I hear it a lot, everywhere, in fact. “Time flies.” “Where has the time gone?” “There’s just not enough hours in the day.” So on, and so forth. And, for the most part I agree, time marches on. Sometimes it seems to move faster than it does at other periods of our lives. So, the one side of time, is the fleeting glimpse of the persons, pieces, and moments that occupied the space formerly known as the present.

Then, there’s the other side of time, spending it. Spending time. As you all probably know by now, I’m not the smartest person in any room I enter. Even so, a couple of times over my working years I have made decisions that were risky, puzzling maybe, and certainly not in line with societal worker bee mentality. Some were clear cut choices, some more out of necessity, and still others based on needs greater than my own. Honestly, though, one underlying theme over these years has been the decision on how my time was going to be spent. Numerous times I’ve chosen to spend time instead of spending money, or even spending more time in making money.

Here’s how I see this other side of time. Dollars are made, dollars are spent. In the end, my dollars end up in someone else’s register drawer or another’s wallet. Either way, I’ll look back at the pictures, or hear the stories, even bask in the memories, and I’ll ask “Where did the time go?” The difference is that the investment of time, time spent with those who matter the most, is not only priceless, but the experience I completely own is also, forever weaved directly into the fabric of time that has elapsed throughout a lifetime.

I can always make another dollar or two, but never again can I recreate time that has passed. So while memory fades, or certainly gets cluttered by the pace of information we daily process, I’ll try to be present now, investing in the memories that are yet to come.