When we end up flying within 4 degrees of the Arctic Circle, to take up the invitation of one of my dearest classmate friends from grad school at Wheaton, to visit her in the Faroe Islands, she surprises us with this hike up this farm mountainside where the infamous character James Bond apparently died, in a movie ironically named, No Time to Die.

It’s a strange thing to find yourself sitting on a peak with wandering sheep on this tipsy top edge of the world & kinda half-smiling at the very real gravestone for the imagined Bond, with that etched abbreviated exhortation of Jack London’s full quote:

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

I look over at my grinning Farmer, and all these glorious grooved lines of time lining his face, an underlining of a lifetime of our memories, and I try to memorize this moment here at the jagged raw cliff at the end of the world, and there’s this feeling it:

When you realize that time is all you have, you realize all that you don’t want to waste your time on.

Do not waste your days wanting more days.

It’s like the wind at the top of the world hushes everything, to ask the only question that matters:

What’s the wisest way to live before you die?

The wisest way to live is to know you have no time to waste.

When you realize that time is all you have, you realize all that you don’t want to waste your time on.

Because:

You don’t have a house… all you have is time that you spend on where you live.

You don’t have a vocation… all you have is time that you choose to give away to a vision, a work, a dream.

You don’t really even have a family or children or your people, in the sense that you don’t have, possess, own them … all you really have is time, fleeting time, to say you love them.

All time is for, is to love — because Love is for forever.

That is to say: When you make time into love, you conquer time, because Love is what goes on forever and without end.

When you realize all you have is time, all you have is one decision: what ways can you make your time into Love?

Running my hands along the engraved lines of the granite gravestone marking the end of Bond, that imagined spy, I can hear the windswept top of the world whispering its secrets to those of us with very real graves coming sooner than we could ever imagine:

Use your time only for what is useful, and it’ll be your very soul that’s left feeling used.

You don’t have to waste your life wanting more days — when you can simply enjoy the days you have more.

Use your time for more than just what is useful, but for partnering with God to make all things beautiful, and you won’t have anything to fear at your funeral.

The greatest function of humanity is to not merely exist, to not merely exist for self, to not merely exist for enjoyment, the greatest function of humanity is to exalt the God who exists, who births stars and everything into existence, and make all of existence about the beauty of enjoying Him.

The way to live and not merely exist is to make every moment simply about deeply enjoying — deeply enjoying the relentless love and beauty of God.

Because He knows:

Enjoying is what enlarges.

You don’t have to waste your life wanting more days — when you can simply enjoy the days you have more.

Now is the time, right now:

Enjoy drippy ice cream and hollyhocks swaying in front of crooked picket fences and laugh too loud with someone today and feel how joy expands your lungs with life while there is still time.

Enjoy the glory of sky over you, and earth under you, and the wonder of Almighty God in the finiteness of you — and feel how He must love you to make His home in you.

Enjoy this moment and the way the light’s warm at your feet right this instant and you will, if you’re unexpectedly blessed, get to hear you love’s footsteps come back to you again today, and you will find their eyes and you will smile, and your heart will explode a bit, that you get all this miracle at least one more time.

Enjoy all this amazing grace, and make every second of all your time into the love that lasts forever.

Every moment that we love has eternity in it.

At the top of this big ole windy world, James Bond’s very real gravestone may have written it in granite, that we aren’t here to merely exist, but to live, that right now we have the time to live, fully live.

And you can feel it, there within, written across your ole thrumming ticker, written there by the finger of God, eternity written right into your fiercely beating heart.

Every moment that we love has eternity in it.

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