As Time Goes By

I can’t believe it was in November, four months ago since we last blogged here. 

We belong to a lay church.  This means we all serve in positions and no one gets paid.  We look upon service to others as one of the main purposes of this earth life.  Sylvia and I were given the opportunity to serve a full time mission from our home.  We are Family Search Support Missionaries. We serve from our home via email and Skype and provide support to the thousands of people who use new FamilySearch to research their family trees.  We are English Missionaries which means we provide support to all English speaking people which includes North America, the United Kingdom, Australia/New Zealand and South Africa.  The work is challenging, stimulating and very rewarding.  The people we interact with (Patrons) email, chat, or Skype us to help them with problems they encounter as they search out their family history.

Now you may be asking yourselves what does this have to do with the last time we blogged.  Well, it was in November of 2011 that we started an intensive training course to prepare us for the types of questions we would receive from Patrons.  We probably attended classes and studied and practiced for more than forty hours per week during November and December.  Then in January we started interacting with Patrons.  So our time has been tied up a bit. 

But now we have been serving three months and our schedule is getting somewhat regular.  As “fulltime” missionaries we are asked to serve a minimum of fifteen hours a week and be available to help out sometimes when things get especially busy.   Our regular time is Monday through Thursday.  We usually start around eight or nine in the morning and stop about one.  But on Tuesdays we have a meeting from Salt Lake City that usually lasts about 1 ½ hours where we are kept up to date on changes and additions to the data base.  And on Wednesdays we have another meeting with our Missionary Team that usually lasts about an hour. 

We had thought when we retired that we would no longer be living by schedules and time.  In fact, I got rid of my watch and refuse to wear one.  But here we are on a schedule again, but one we find we don’t mind too much.  But I still don’t wear a watch.

As I have gotten older, I have had to start taking medications for this and that.  I have a little box that holds my week’s worth of pills divided into days and those I take morning and evening.  Once each week I have to refill my box with the coming week’s pills.  I joke with Sylvia that my life is measured by the week, by the day I fill up my pill box.  As I fill up the sections of the box, I usually remark, “Another week of my life has flown by”.  This has made me aware of the passing of time and how quickly the weeks go by.

I recently read an article about time passing with the speed of lightening.  It states “Time is a precious commodity, one that some protect and use wisely, but others waste.

It is a sort of shape shifter: to the very young, it seems to drag on; to the old, it flies by. The young think that Christmas or the next birthday will never arrive; many older people can hardly believe how quickly the years have passed — it seems only a short while ago that their now grown-up children were babes in arms.
Members of older generations identify with Tevye's questions in the wedding song of "Fiddler on the Roof." Tevye is amazed that the little girl he carried has grown "to be a beauty" and "the little boy at play" has grown "to be so tall," and then wonders, "I don't remember growing older, When did they?...Wasn't it yesterday when they were small?"

He goes on, singing about how "swiftly flow the days,...swiftly fly the years, One season following another, Laden with happiness and tears" ("Sunrise, Sunset," words and music by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, from the movie, "Fiddler on the Roof," 1964).”

The quality of our lives is determined by how we spend our time. Time, in reality, is more precious than money; it is irreplaceable. Funds wasted, spent or lost can be recovered, regained or restored. Time cannot.

We often make detailed plans for something and when it doesn’t work out exactly as we planned we can almost always put it right, get over it, and learn from it.  But when we miss out on something, it is gone.  We should never let the solution to a problem become more important than a person to be loved.

If you do something that turns out not quite as you had planned, you can almost always put it right, get over it, and learn from it. But once you've missed out on something, it's gone....we need to strive never to let a problem become more important than a person to be loved. Friends move away, children grow up, loved ones pass on. It's so easy to take others for granted, until that day when they're gone from our lives and we are left with feelings of 'what if' and 'if only.' Said author Harriet Beecher Stowe, 'The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.'

Let us relish life as we live it, find joy in the journey and share our love with friends and family. One day, each of us will run out of tomorrows. Let us not put off what is most important.

Time, literally, is running out — for each of us. We have less remaining today than we had yesterday, and we have no idea how much of it we have left in our lives. Let us each make the most of our time.