TODAY—Living fully every day  

We tend to focus on very special days, like birthdays, or major festival days. The ordinariness and routine of the other days tends to mean that we treat them too casually.

The word “today” appears more than two hundred times in the New International Version of the Bible. Many simply add a historical moment to a particular event. Others are so well known that we hardly notice them. For example, how often have we said the Lord’s Prayer without even noticing that we pray “Give us today our daily bread”?

Every day is a new beginning. If we brought this to mind early each day it might just influence the way we live through the day. Bishop Thomas Ken reminds us of this truth in the first verse of his famous poem and hymn “Awake my soul and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run” There’s nothing like a fresh start to revive our enthusiasm to do better. Today is the beginning of the rest of our life.

There is a second, perhaps more challenging way of regarding this present day. Whilst today may be the first day of the rest of our life it could also be our last day. In the next verse of his hymn Thomas Ken reminds us of this, “Redeem thy mis-spent time that’s past and live this day as if thy last”.

Whether we regard today as the first day of the rest of our life, or with the potential of it being the day of our death, both ideas challenge us to live in the present as fully as we can, in faith hope and love. We need to hear God’s voice today (see Psalm 95:7), and we need to respond to His loving guidance on our lives today. We can only do this in the present moment. We can only do this now.

Roger M. Vaughan