Wednesday Night

I enjoy Wednesday night Bible studies.  It is a long time between Sunday worship services and during that time, the busy rat race can wear us down.  Our lives our crowded with job pressures, family chores, and many other vexations.  Meeting midweek is a chance to get the mind off the rat race and recharge the the spiritual mind.  At Camden Avenue, we have many good Bible studies on Wednesday nights.

This past Wednesday night was special for a personal reason.  I was born at 7:30 PM on July 2 and this past Wednesday was my birthday.  How special it was that the exact time I turned another year older, I was teaching a Bible class. 

At 6:30 PM, we were on our way to the church building for the service.  I told Robin that in one hour I would turn 49 years old.  Therefore, I was going to enjoy my last hour of being 48.  For a whole year I had been 48 but that year was coming to an end and I spent my last hour of 48 in retrospect.

The year 48 was gone.  Time had marched on and all I had done and experienced was now in the realm of memory.  Time does that.  Once it has past us, only memories exist.  We want those memories to be pleasant ones but we have to create them that way.  The way we live  now determines, in large part, on how we will remember the time once it is past.  And once past, time can never be reclaimed.

Then, during the service, I looked up at the clock and it was 7:30 PM.  Even while making some brilliant point in class, I had the presence of mind to note the moment of my birth.  I was now 49 years old and a new year was at hand.  I knew what happened when I was 48 because that was now memory.  But despite all the hopes and dreams of the new year, no one can tell what the future holds.  We may make all the plans for the future we want but have no idea we’ll ever see those plans through.  Certainly time does march on leaving a torrent of memories in its wake but at some point time stops for us and eternity begins.  Birthdays at church remind us that we are truly “marching to Zion.”