Psalm 139:16 Your eyes saw me when I was formless; all my days were written in your book and planned before a single one of them began.

      All my days have been written in the Lord’s book. Until the last page and sentence of what has been written about me is fulfilled, through Christ’s grace I will try to keep my heart and mind in line with what God created me to fulfill. Psalm 139:16 Your eyes saw me when I was formless; all my days were written in your book and planned before a single one of them began. Our life’s pursuits are often askew when we try to live as we think life should be. We move through life trying to succeed according to what the world calls success, but do we understand what God says success is? We don’t know what we don’t know and many years can go by before we realize we have been pursuing the wrong ambitions and walking on the wrong trail, often leading to nowhere. What we thought was chasing a dream turned out to be chasing hallucinations of grandeur Eccl. 2:17 So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. For everything is futile and a pursuit of the wind.

      I realize that meandering one’s way through life and bouncing from one concept of success to another might be adventurous and feel free-spirited, but like the Prodigal Son, many end up floundering at a pig’s trough of discontent trying to find meaning for their lives. Luke 15:16 The young man became so hungry that even the pods he was feeding the pigs looked good to him. But no one gave him anything. God has a way of doing things, and His ways are far different than ours. We do not adjust well to what is contrary to our nature, and many times God asks us to do things that seem to cut against the grain of our will. However, if Christ is our Saviour, and we are freely walking with the Lord, our will begins to lean toward God’s will as He engrafts His eternal moral holiness into our hearts and minds. The thing we need to remember is that when we accepted the sacrifice of the cross within our hearts, our nature began to change into the redemptive person God knows us to be in Christ. We need to walk in this redemptive gift until our time has come to leave this earth.

      We all have an allotted amount of time that God has given us, and until our invitation has come to meet our creator face to face, we need to live, seek and ask of God throughout our lives. This is not a maybe I will call on God, or maybe I won’t type of existence. Relationship with the Lord is a full-time existence. As the writer of the Hebrews wrote, we need to run and endure the race set before us. Heb. 12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with endurance the race set out for us.

       When we live our lives in Christ and mature in His righteousness, we begin to comprehend that as we take part in this race, we do not have to come in first, second, or four hundred and forty-seventh. What becomes important to the Lord, and within our lives, is that we finish this life-long race that has been set before us and that we complete it with the grace God has given us. The race we run in is not a race of being perfect as a man describes perfection. Perfection for our lives is found in Jesus, and through His perfection we run our race and even if we fall we are still perfect in God’s eyes. Prov. 24:16a For though a righteous man may fall seven times, he still gets up.

       After the race has been run, and our lives have created their history within the salvation God gave us, we will eventually receive the victor’s crown. 2Tim. 4:8 In the future there is reserved for me the victor’s crown of righteousness for being right with God and doing right, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that great day—and not to me only, but also to all those who have loved and longed for and welcomed His appearing. We do not have the luxury of slacking off and becoming complacent of heart. Our time is short on the scale of eternity. How often have you put something off until one day the need to do what was put off doesn’t matter anymore? It ran past its usefulness date and now there is a small sorrow pinching at your conscience wishing you had done it. Eccl. 4:7 I observed yet another example of something meaningless under the sun.

       I believe this is why a bucket list becomes so important to some people as they near the evening of their lives. Do we all have regrets and wish there was a possibility of a do-over for some segments of the years gone by that we lived? Yes, we all have those sore spot blunders we could have done differently. However, those days are done and gone and we are alive today living with the results of a lifetime of choices. The question is, what are we going to do with the time we have left? Hopefully, we are going to accept the promise that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning and we will live within the fullness of His mercy. Lam. 3:23 Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each morning. Maybe fulfilling a bucket list of things God wants for our lives might be a good idea. Let’s try this listed item for today. Matt. 22:37 Jesus declared, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38  This is the great and first commandment.