Don't Waste Your Life
By Sarah Trejo
This morning I am thankful for the alone time that God has allowed to take place. It can be difficult to find the time to calm one’s mind and heart with the business of everyday tasks and commitments. To sit and meditate on what God has been showing you is an important part of the Christian life. This helps us to refocus on God’s will and way for our life and gears us away from our tendency to get caught up in the humanistic world’s will and way.
I was going to write on the topic of the value of life this morning, but once again when words began making their way unto “cyber paper” and forming sentences and meaning, an epiphany hit me like a pickup truck’s brights hit my vision from the rearview mirror of my small 1998 Chevy cavalier. Don’t Waste Your Life. Some may have read John Piper’s book. As for myself, I was referred this book the other day but have not yet read it. It started out a couple days ago when I was working with a patient, and we got on the topic of our spouses and how we met. To back up just a bit; I work on a cancer unit as a Nurse. Our patients have blood cancers which are sometimes curable, and other times terminal. I often ask myself how God can use me there, and I honestly struggle trying to save people’s physical beings while their spiritual beings are heading towards death. This is a real battle in “physically treating” in the medical field. I have prayed for conversations to be brought up on eternal focus and hope, and for guidance when these conversations do get brought up. Anyways, this patient and I are both married to Ecuadorians, so we found ourselves asking more questions on how we met our spouses and what drew us to each other. The Ecuadorian wife laughed and asked me if “he could play the guitar”. Funny that my husband can, but I shared that it was our beliefs and faith that was the main tie. Both of their eyes lit up even more and they both said, “Us too!”. The husband began sharing with me his involvement in Missions in Ecuador for over 10 years and how through studying Biblical theology, God really shaped his understanding of the Gospel and meaning of life. He told me about how he sold his house and workshop and moved to Ecuador to basically live a missionary life. It was very refreshing and encouraging to meet this person who is going through this physical challenge, with such a strong focus on what really matters in life; the spiritual being and God’s will and use of us as vessels. He told me that John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life is a must read and will change your way of how you want to live your life. I want to share this with the church as this was and is a very awesome encounter that God brought about, with not just a spousal cultural similarity, but also a larger focus on the kingdom of God and how Christian’s are tied to each other all around the world by an invisible spiritual string. It is there! Since the string is invisible, we often forget it is there, and also tend to stretch that string to gear away from the mainstay to get consumed by the world and living a meaningless life.
Photo taken by Sarah Trejo, Ecuador 2014
Let us be used by God to pull each other closer and bring new souls to this string so that we can become more confident and intentional with our life.
We must wake up each day and ask ourselves, “How does God want to use me today?” and to, “Pray to give us an opportunity to help grow YOUR Kingdom and to encourage and bring life to others.” The sermon a couple of weeks ago on the hired laborers validated the importance of being active and not wasting your life away while here on earth.
Matthew 20:1-19
It was a perfect connecting message to what God was speaking to me through the divine meeting with this married couple at work.
6...He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
Don’t waste life away! God has so much in store for us. Be active, share, and show the good news with those who are lost, or even encourage those who already know, so that they can experience the immense joy and zeal for life that He intended His creation to have!