Don't Waste Your Life

I just started reading this book and have already gained so much from it. How we spend our time is an important issue to God, and something that we will have to give an account for. I personally have fallen prey at times to the idea that the use of my time is not a serious thing. It is; and this book reveals a lot of truth on the subject.

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Just when I was about to leave my South Carolina home in 1964, never to return as a resident, Wade Hampton High School published a simple literary magazine of poems and stories. Near the back, with the byline Johnny Piper, was a poem. I will spare you. It was not a good poem. Jane, the editor, was merciful. What matters to me now is the title and first four lines. It was called "The Lost Years." Beside it was a sketch of an old man in a rocking chair. The poem began:

Long I sought for the earth's hidden meaning;
Long as a youth was my search in vain.
Now as I approach my last years waning,
My search I must begin again.

Across the forty years that separate me from that poem I can hear the fearful refrain "I've wasted it! I've wasted it!" Somehow there had been wakened in me a passion for the essence and the main point of life. The ethical question "whether something is permissible" faded in relation to the question "what is the main thing, the essential thing?" The thought of building a life around minimal morality or minimal significance--a life defined by this question "What is permissible?"--felt almost disgusting to me. I didn't want a minimal life. I didn't want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it.

~Don't Waste Your Life (pages 13&14), John Piper