So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalms 90:12
My phone died. And just like all those commercials advertising backups for your computer, I lost a lot of data, namely my pictures. These weren’t just any pictures, they were pictures of the first month of life of my first child; they were pictures of our vacation to Mexico; and, oh, a number of cat photos the world will never see again! All my pictures and screenshots of the past two years were gone.
Now I admit, I was partly to blame for this loss. My phone, while not quite “old” (it was still under two years) had been starting to be a little glitchy. It would sporadically decide it was tired and just turn off. It would vibrate like I was getting messages while none appeared—until I would power it down and restart it. Sometimes I had to restart it two or three times. My husband said we should make sure everything was downloaded to the Cloud and I agreed but we never took any action. I felt sure there would be time to do this. I kept thinking that before it finally died, it would give me a warning—a kind of false-alarm crash which would be scary, but we would then have the opportunity to download everything before it officially crashed. Unfortunately, my phone didn’t play by these rules—it just died.
I got a new phone and anxiously waited to see if, miraculously, everything would transfer with no loss. The setup process completed, my husband handed me my phone and I touched the photo app hoping against hope that all of the pictures I had taken of the early days with my son would be there. They weren’t. It was like my phone had amnesia. Everything from the past two years, apparently my storage had reached maximum capacity, was gone. Looking at it you would think the past two years had never happened.
Of course, the first thing I thought of was the loss of photos of my son which, if I am being honest, isn’t the loss it first sounds like as I sent the really cute photos to my family and friends and can recoup them by having them sent back to me. In addition, my husband still has all his photos. The second loss was all the screenshots and pictures of notes I had taken over the years of things I wanted to be sure not to forget, recipes, quotes, funny memes—gone. Then, of course, I realized how many photos disappeared of my first babies—my kitties and my doggie, and then I realized that all of my photos from trips we had taken over that past two years were gone.
Naturally all of this got me thinking … how much of this “loss” would really have lasting value? How much would end up mattering that I lost in the end? The photos of my son I will miss. The pictures of the good times on vacation, I would miss. A few of the kitty photos will also be missed … but the rest? I haven’t missed them yet.
Just as my phone’s storage was full of lots of things that didn’t really matter, I wonder: Are our lives the same?
How do we spend the time of our lives? There is the staggering statistic that the average American spends three hours a day watching TV, three hours! Is TV watching that important to us? Most say no, but still spend the three hours watching anyway. We spend one-eighth of our day doing something that hardly matters to us—we are spending this with the currency of time, the only non-renewable resource on this planet. We are wasting the time of our lives.
I thought there would be time “later” to download all the photos on my phone. What other things in our lives do we think there will be time for later?
When we look back over the years of our lives, how much of it is spent doing what we really want to? I was listening to a podcast by an author by the name of Oliver Burkeman who was being interviewed about his new book and the gist of his quote was that we wait to start the thing we’ve said we have always wanted to do, in part, because we think there will be time later; we don’t have to face the fact that the time of our lives is not infinite.
The time of our lives is not infinite, yet we get so caught up pursuing things that don’t matter and which are not truly important to us. I lost two years of photos on my phone and most of them didn’t really matter and I’m guessing the same might be more or less true for you, but what if we erased the last two years of our lives? Would we miss it? More importantly, would others miss it? Or have we been so self-centered that our time has revolved just around us and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference to others if it had never happened. Have we spent our time wisely and invested in people, things, and in places that will make a difference in eternity?