SANDS OF TIME

Sands of Time, Jamestown, NC

Today marks the seventy first year I’ve been active on this planet. And I’ve received many best wishes from friends that have crossed paths with me over the years. We all know that we encounter thousands of people during our lifetime, some more often than others. People come into our lives for a lifetime, an instant, an hour, a season or a reason. But of all the billions of people that are available at any one moment, we really interface with just a chosen few. Certainly some have a profound influence on the direction of our life and others are simply fleeting images. But I think they all matter in some way.

We briefly exchange carefully considered words with a nameless and faceless person at the fast food drive through. We donate life giving blood to nameless and faceless people who may actually walk up to us at some point in our spiritual future and personally thank us for selfless giving. There quite possibly have been encounters with spiritual beings that have enabled us to avert tragedy or worse and we may have never known it. We may have entertained strangers and not realized they were very unique beings. I’ve played many hours of sports in my day and knew teammates for a literal season that then faded out of my life forever. I worked with hundreds of people for thirty years and then departed one day, never to see most of them again. And then there’s the close circle of friends and family that I have known most all of my life who have had a profound effect on me.

I frankly never expected to live this long. When I was younger, seventy one years seemed like a very long time. But now it doesn’t seem like it took that long from this perspective. I’ve had a rather adventurous life with more than one close encounter. Not everyone has the benefit of pausing to reflect on a full life that has included innumerable blessings, including even the dark patches along the way. I’ve always believed that mistakes and failures, and even tough times, were never regrettable if you were smart enough to learn and grow from them. They come with the territory. If you’re living without many failures, you probably aren’t stretching the boundaries of the life you’ve been blessed to receive. Of all the zillions of human beings created over the shifting sands of time, your soul was uniquely created for you--and all those journeymen that have passed through the hourglass of time with you in your moment to shine have either influenced your path or been redirected by the language of your life!