Introduction...

This weekend my middle daughter who is eight, asked me to retell the story of how her mother and I met. As I recounted with vivid memory of how we were first introduced by a mutual friend at a high school dance on January 14, 1989, the story quickly evolved into a math game for her that went something like this...

Kaelyn: So how long did you date before you got married?

me: Seven and a half years.

K: How long from the time you met until Hailey was born?

me: Nine years.

K: How long from the time you met until I was born?

me: Eleven years.

K: (thinking) So Hailey is two years older than me. How long from the time you met until Abby was born?

me: Fourteen years (now I'm thinking... fourteen years? has it really been that long?).

K: So I am three years older than Abby.

me: Uh-huh. (Feeling confident in her mental math abilities, Kaelyn wanders off and I'm left to continue the math).

Wow. It doesn't seem possible that in a few months I will have known my wife for 20 years! Sometimes I feel as though I'm still 20 years old. Where did the time go?

One of my new favorite authors is Rob Bell, who is a Christian pastor of the Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He participates in this DVD series called Nooma and in one of the lessons titled, "Today," he suggests that despair begins to set in when we long for the past, thinking that our best days are behind us (for more on Rob Bell or this series, visit http://www.nooma.com/) . When I was going through that mental math exercise with my daughter, I began to long for the past a little. I wanted to hold all my daughters again as they were babies.

Bell goes onto say that if you need to celebrate an accomplishment that happened years ago, then celebrate. If you need to apologize for something, apologize. If you need to grieve a loss, then grieve. But afterward, move on. Then he succinctly sums it up, "when we're still holding onto how things were, our arms are not free to embrace today."

How about you? Is there something in your life that is keeping you from moving forward? Is there someone you need to apologize to or forgive? Do you feel like you are fully present for the ones you love so that you are truly living without any regret?

How we think about time and reference it in our lives is a clue to whether we fully experience the best that life has to offer... today.