Yes, after celebrating another birthday today, I have lived a quarter of a century. That’s quite a while: 300 months, or 1,300 weeks. 9,125 days, if you prefer, or 219,000 hours. My life has exceeded 13 million minutes: I’ve lived over 788 million seconds. As I fight for enough time to accomplish each week’s goals, I would give anything for a few more hours (especially in the morning when my alarm rings!), but I find myself unable to turn time back – not even with my snooze button.

What can I do? Time pushes on inexorably and I can’t do a thing about it! My life isn’t waiting for me! The opportunities and responsibilities of each day rudely push past me without so much as a howdy-do and I’m left standing open-mouthed, knowing that things are getting done and life is going on, but also realizing my inability to fully appreciate, enjoy or even be aware of all that happens in my life.

I’m reminded the final act from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town – the one where the recently-dead Emily Gibbs observes a day from her young life. Overwhelmed by how much she took for granted while life raced by, Emily asks, “Doesn’t anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” The Stage Manager answers her, “No. Saints and poets, maybe; they do some.” And he’s right – while some people seem to get more out of life (more joy, contentment, success, prosperity or fame), nobody comes to the end of the day and thinks, “What a day – I got everything I could out of it. I can’t imagine being more satisfied with a completely experienced day!” If we would honestly look back over our day as we pillow our head at night, we’d face the knowledge that we missed something here or we did something wrong there or something over here just didn’t make sense. We may find contentment and sweet rest, but ultimate satisfaction? Not likely. Oddly enough, our inability to enjoy life fully isn’t the only source of dissatisfaction.

Just as pertinent and poignant is the realization that this life isn’t enough. I feel a sense of disappointment because I can’t make full use of life’s opportunities; even if I could, I still would have find fulfillment because there’s some potential in me that life can’t fill. In the words of Wilder’s Stage Manager, “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

Or if you prefer the words of the wisest man who ever lived, “He has also set eternity in their heart” (Solomon, Ecclesiastes 3.11). Where did that “something way down deep that’s eternal” come from? God put it into our heart. We’re created to run on a bigger track than “life under the sun.” Solomon’s conclusion in Ecclesiastes – the way to satisfy that heart-eternity – is a relationship with God: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments” (Eccl. 12.13). Do you feel the frustration of an unfulfilled and unfulfilling life? The solution to your problem is found in a personal relationship with the loving God who made you.