Glow Stick

When I was a little kid I went roller-skating at a skating rink, and I came home with one of those glow sticks that doesn't light up until you snap it. It lasts for a few hours, but after a while it loses its neon glow.

I didn't know this before I cracked it. So I'm in my living room with my lit-up glow stick, and my mom sees it. "Oh that's cool, Shan. Those last for a few hours, right?"

I freaked out. I seriously started crying (I'm laughing as I type this because it's so ridiculous) and lay on the couch, upset that the light wouldn't last. My mom tried to point out the logic of playing with the glow stick now before it stopped glowing, but my logic was, Why play with it if it's not going to last?

This wrong way of thinking isn't unique to the minds of kids. Yesterday I had the day off of work, the remnant of the Independence Day weekend. But it went by too fast, and I sat there thinking about how I seemed to be wasting my day off instead of enjoying it, focusing on how it was disappearing instead of actually living it out. All the things I wanted to do that day --- make a smoothie, go read my book in my favorite bookstore downtown, walk the bridge, walk the beach, drive somewhere, anywhere --- I only got to do one of them because I wasted a lot of time lamenting my lack of time.

That's when I remembered the glow stick. The ridiculousness is the same. Why do we do this? Miss out on now because we're consumed with how now becomes then? Life slips away when you try to cling to it. A life is made up of years, consisting of months, made up of weeks, made up of days, made up of hours....minutes....seconds....a moment. What would it look like to walk out that sadly cliched phrase, "Live life to the fullest?" What does that even mean?

For me, I think it means letting my yes be yes and my no be no. To be decisive, to quit analyzing every little thing and just go DO it. To actually finish the things I start. To trade worry, which is basically saying, "God, I don't trust you" for a confidence in Him, knowing that it's not by might, nor by power, but by His spirit. And to have the perspective that this moment is the only one of its kind, never to be repeated, and that I'm allowed to enjoy it, or learn from it, or plod through it with His guidance. Of course that moment won't last. This life isn't meant to! But it's certainly meant to be lived.