Fill Each Square With What Matters Most

A very wise Dutchman by the name of Lewis Smedes wrote this several decades ago....


"I bought a brand new date book yesterday, the kind I use every year, spiral bound, black imitation leather covers wrapped around pages and pages of blank boxes. Each square has a number to tell me which day of the month I am in at the moment. Every square is a frame for one episode of my life. Before I'm through with the book, I will fill the squares with classes I teach, people with whom I have had lunch, meetings I sat through, and these are only the things I cannot afford to forget. I also fill the squares with things I do not write down, thousands of cups of coffee, loving, praying, and hopefully gestures of help to my neighbours. Whatever I do, it has to fit inside one of the squares in my date book. I live one square at a time. The four lines that make up the box are the walls of time that organise my life. Each box has an invisible door that leads to the next square. As if by a silent stroke, the door opens and I am pulled through, as if by a magnet, sucked into the next square in line. There I will again fill the time frame that seals me - fill it with my busy-ness just as I did the square before. As I get older, the squares seem to get smaller. One day I will walk into a square that has no door. There will be no mysterious opening, and no walking into an adjoining square. One of those squares will be terminal. I do not know which square it will be". Smedes continued, "..when we walk into that final square, it isn't a box at all. It turns out to be a door. The four walls that confined us melt away, and time is no more. Then our real life, far from being over, turns out to have just begun".


I think that last square is an opening into a new world where God will set everything right. One day you will enter it, and so will I. In the meantime we must fill our squares wisely!