A Wasted Life

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The day shuts its skyward doors, pinching away any hope of redeemed time.
In ridiculous ritual, she retrieves her book and sits in silence.
Her book doesn’t hold any handwritten script or cherished family memories.
It doesn’t even hold a single worn page.

Her book holds the only record she faithfully keeps; the only score she can ever seem to recall.
The only chains, however imaginary they may be, that she still allows to hold her.
She messily slides her mental charcoal from its case and makes a mark.
A single short and eternally destructive slash.
A slash that determines a fate.

Every mark becomes a bar that she ignorantly welds to her own prison.
In her prison she steeps in fear so strong that it consumes her like an unattended flame.
A fear so present in her, she fears that if she were cut she would surely bleed it.
A fear so gripping that is strangles her joy.
A fear so destructive that she cowers in the corner instead of moving mountains with her faith.

She fears that she has wasted.

Wasted a minute.
Wasted an opportunity.
Wasted a day.

In proverbial torture she keeps her mocking tally – a gallery of black slashes;
a firm reminder of repeated and redundant failure.
She has heard it before: waste not, want not.
It made sense to her.
If only she could stop wasting so frequently perhaps she could stop wanting so deeply.

Oh, how her wants outnumbered even her oldest and best kept tally.
She has wasted money, yet still wants security.
She has wasted efforts, yet still wants energy.
She has wasted dreams, yet still wants success.
She has wasted time and still wants more to spend.

Utterly wasted.

Her spirit toils every evening as the night creeps forward and brings with it her greatest and most buried fear:  WHAT  IF  I  WASTE  MY  LIFE?

As the doors of the day close in an unwelcome conclusion, she falls into habit again.
She reaches for her book and finds her seat in the silent dusk.
Time to take stock of another day.

But this time, it’s not her charcoal that collides with her imaginary paper,
it’s her spirit, so full of wanting, that collides with her Creator.

She messily, yet beautifully, slips out of her chair and falls to her knees.
In a flood of delayed recognition she realizes that the problem has not been the amount and number of her waste, but the object and place of it.

Her deep wanting is not caused by wasted days but by an empty altar.

She sees for the first time, and will now for all of time,
that every second must be spent, not on hoarding her days, but on lavishing praise.
This is the most beautiful waste.

Every space once empty with wanting now floods with praise.
She is cut open in His sight and in His company, yet this time she bleeds not of fear, but of sheer adoration.

Praise. Flattery. Magnification.

With ferocity she burns her book and watches the ashes ascend to Heaven in a fiery offering.

On her knees, not in weakness, but stronger than ever, she makes one final decision:

She will WASTE her life on Him.
And she will never want for anything else again.

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