I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would ever quote Charles Darwin on this blog, but he got this one thing right. “Anyone who can waste an hour has not learned the value of life.” Time is what life is made of. It has been said many times that when you give someone some of your time, you are giving them a valuable piece of your life that cannot be retrieved. Time is not an invention of man. It is something man has discovered as a part of God’s creation. It is based on the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of the Earth around the sun and the orbit of the moon around the Earth. Life was first measured in days, weeks, months and years. As science became more exact, it has been farther divided into hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds (one thousandth of a second) and even nanoseconds (one billionth of a second). However you measure it, the time of your life is priceless.
Life is a “limited time offer” with a specific expiration date that is known only to the Creator (whom Charles Darwyn overlooked). According to 93% of prominent biologists worldwide, life begins at conception. Sadly, many of those biologists believe in abortion rights in spite of that scientific knowledge. You know how I feel about abortion, so I will share these words from Mother Teresa on the subject. “Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three-quarters of its victims are women; half the babies and all of the mothers.” “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”
When people devalue life at its beginning, they will also devalue the life of the elderly and handicapped (me). Making the patient “comfortable” is the goal of hospitals and nursing facilities under Medicare guidelines. Seven years ago, my wife was transferred from a hospital to a nursing home for physical therapy to regain her strength for continued cancer treatment. Her first night there, she told the nurse practitioner she was in pain. After seeing cancer on her chart she slapped a very strong pain patch on her. Carol could not stay awake long enough to eat. After getting half a bowl of soup in her before she dozed off again, I called her oncologist and begged him to intervene. He ordered a much lower pain patch and she immediately started eating and looking forward to physical therapy. I noticed full trays of food carried out from her roommate and before Carol was ready to go home, a funeral director came and wheeled out her roommate’s body. When I could get Carol out of there, I left skid marks in their parking lot. It still makes me cringe when I hear someone promote “Medicare for all”. Canada’s health minister has bragged about the millions of dollars they have saved each year since assisted suicide has been legalized there. Evidently America does the same thing with pain patches to make people more comfortable while starving to death. Life is too precious to put a monetary price tag on it.
Before we can value the life of others, we must value every nanosecond of our own life. When we are filled with the love of God, we can easily find meaning and value in a life of service to God and others. We can find comfort and joy in the knowledge that as long as we have life, God is not done with us yet. Life is so precious that God offers to extend it eternally through faith in His Son; providing new, spiritual, life that begins the moment we first believe and continues beyond our physical death.