YOLO, right?

I only get one today to live, and it is my job to make the best of every moment. There are 24 hours in every day and every human is blessed with an equal opportunity to utilize that 24 hour period. As the clichéd Latin saying goes, carpe diem. That saying is quite dated. It gets it roots from a book of poems by Horace written around 23 BC. In modern times, the phrase has taken on a  bit of a hedonistic connotation, but I actually find the idea to be quite Biblical. The phrase has colloquially been trimmed down from "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero", probably because, for one, Latin is a dead language and is no longer taught, and also because it's just a lot easier to say carpe diem.  The full phrase loosely translates to "seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next day." The preceding lines in Horace's poem read "be wise, be truthful, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have fled." This is rich advice. Let's look at it in its entirety before I start to dissect it.

     be wise, be truthful, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes
     to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have fled:
     seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next day

Who doesn't want to be wise? Even most  fools want to be wise, they just don't take proper action to obtain wisdom.
Being truthful is always a best policy. Nobody can trust a liar.
Straining the wine is how you remove any impurities from the wine. I don't know much about oenology, but from what I gather,  this is an essential process before the wine becomes drinkable. The Latin translation, according to most  scholars, connotes that the sediments be removed so the wine could be immediately consumed. So, this is further hammering in the idea to be  prepared  to live out the current day.

Okay, so now we start getting into the more  relevant stuff. I am quite fond of the line "while we speak, envious time has fled." I saw a billboard the other day in Erie that read "hesitation kills more dreams that failure." Isn't that the truth? As a person who is constantly dreaming and constantly talking, I find that it is not a lack of substance or feasibility to my dreams that has killed them, rather, it has been thinking them over and debating the pros and cons while the opportunity passed me by. In no way do I feel that forming a habit of hasty decision making is advisable, but neither is waiting on ideal timing. While we spend precious time talking ourselves into or out of  decisions, time that can never be regained has passed. Both acting too slowly and acting too swiftly can prove dangerous, if not toxic, to productivity.

The advice of being wise and truthful both come in handy in regards to making decisions. We have to be wise enough to use discernment. We have to be wise enough to prioritize appropriately, otherwise we'll constantly be overwhelmed and never make the most of each day. We also have to be truthful, most importantly to ourselves. We have to ask ourselves what we value most. We have to ask ourselves what is truly motivating us. We have to honestly evaluate our fears. Are they realistic? Do they have substance? Or are the only teeth that they have teeth that we've given them in our own imaginations?  Being wise and truthful are of huge importance in our spiritual lives as well. If we're not wise and truthful with our walk with God, we end looking a lot like the hypocritical Pharisees. And ain't nobody got time for the Pharisees.

The next line is almost a line that could be taken straight from the book of James. Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow. James 4:14 reminds us "You do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." That is so true. In my young life, I've seen people who acted as though they were going to live forever disappear from this life in a moment. One moment they were here, and just like the mist the book of James describes, they were gone.

It's important that we evaluate and reflect on our lives daily. We need to address issues that need to be addressed, because if we put them off, we may not have the opportunity to fix them tomorrow. Is there somebody that we need to forgive? Carpe diem it, man. Take the difficult step and let it go. Give your anger to God. Pray for them, and I guarantee that God will change you in the process.  Is there somebody that you need to ask forgiveness from? Don't put it off. They may reject your gesture. It may even seem to backfire on you, but you'll be able to know that you made your best effort to live in peace with everybody (Romans 12:18).

In your busyness, did you miss an opportunity to show love? Make up for it today. Commit right now to being a better spouse, a better sibling, a better parent, a better boss, a better friend. Make a choice to not to close your eyes to the basic opportunities God puts in front of you. It's easy to do it. It's easy to write them off.  Love big. Love like it might be your last chance to warms somebody's heart.

Have you stopped appreciating the beauty of life? Take a few minutes today to look at all the wonders that surround you. Get up early and watch the sunrise. Take a break from the craziness of life and watch the sunset. Take another break before you go to sleep to step outside and look up to the stars. You'll be amazed at how your perspective changes when you begin appreciating those every day things.

In the book Accept No Mediocre Life, David Foster portrays our 24 hour days this way:

     Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400, but carries over no
     balance from one day to the next and allows no cash-on-hand balance. Every evening you lose
     what you failed to use that day. What would you do? Draw out and spend every cent, every day, of
     course! Well, you have such a bank; its your time. Every morning God gives you 86,400 seconds.
     Every night you lose whatever you have failed to put to good use. It carries over no balance. It
    allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the records of the
    day before. If you fail to use the day's deposit, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no
    drawing against it tomorrow. You must live in the present on today's deposit. Invest it so that you
    will get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and success...
     Time seems to be one of the things we don't get smart about until we are looking back in regret.
     To realize the value of one year, ask a student who has failed his finals and has to repeat the same
     class again next year. To realize the value of a month, as a mother who has given birth to a
     premature baby whose survival is touch and go. To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of
     a weekly newspaper whose deadlines are coming due at the same time. To realize the value of a
     day, ask a daily wage earner who has ten kids to feed and not a dime to waste. To realize the value
     of an hour, ask a love-struck girl who is waiting to be reunited with her beau at a train station after
     a long separation. To realize the value of a minute, ask the love-struck beau who missed the train
     on the way back to see his beloved. To realize the value of one second, ask a young woman
    who just missed a speeding car that ran a red light at the intersection she went through. To realize
    the value of a millisecond, ask the person who won a silver medal in the Olympics instead of 
    the gold he had been training for all of his life....time waits  for no one. It cannot hold on, slow
    down, or back up. It is moving ahead without regard to your plans or priorities. it isn't against you
    or for you.

  
The artist drake has released a song called The Motto, which contains the phrase YOLO. I didn't know what that meant for the longest time, though I heard people saying it, singing it, and even saw it on T-shits.  It means You Only Live Once.  That song is wildly successful. It has sold over three million copies and has become a bit of an anthem for the young crowds (it has over 43 million youtube views). It's true that we only live once, and that's why it is so important that we don't use our time recklessly.  We all get the same amount of time in the day, but we don't all get the same amount of days. Hebrews 9:27 reminds us that "Man is destined to die once, and after that face judgment." Like the vanishing morning mist, so too are our lives. We have no guarantees for tomorrow. We have no guarantees that we'll make it to the next second in the 86,400 that today consists of. One day, we all die. And on that day, we will be judged. The good news is that we'll be judged by a God who judges everybody by the same standards, and that standard is whether or not we accepted and were transformed by Jesus Christ. I've known many people who said they'd get their affairs in order the next day, and for them the next day never came.

You only live once, so how are you going to live today? Are you going to live it selfishly or are you going to live it out like the gift that it is? Are you going to live it out like it is your very last day, focusing on what matters? Are you going to spend it as though the possibility of being judged by a Holy and just God is a reality? Because it is a reality, and once you take your last breath on earth, your time to make a decision to honor God is up. The You Only Live Once slogan is true to an extent, but it neglects the realities of the afterlife. There is an  eternity and we'll all end up there someday, and the only merits we'll be judged by is whether we chose to live for Jesus or something else. We can only truly seize the day when we choose to live for God. In comparison to heaven, everything else we spend our milliseconds on earth doing can never compare. As 1 Corinthians 7:31 tells us "Those who use the things of the world should not become attached to them. For this world as we know it will soon pass away."  Think about that. Everything that we've ever cared about and loved on earth will perish. Even secular  science backs that up with the laws of thermodynamics - sooner or later everthing turns to poop.
1 John 2:17 put it all into perspective. "The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever." What is God's will? First He desires us to love and honor Him above all else. Then, His will is for us is to love everybody as He loves them. And lastly, His will is for us to  go and change the world by showcasing His love for mankind in tangible ways. At the end of every 86,400 seconds, that's really all that matters. Am I loving God, and I loving others, and out of that love am I helping to create authentic Jesus followers?

You only live once, at least on this earth. So how does the life you've been living look?