I woke up today. I don’t know if I’ll wake up tomorrow. How do I know my immune system will not fail? How do I know my lungs will expand and not collapse with the next breath I take? How do I know my heart will clench around the next influx of blood cells? I don’t. I could die in the next moment as surely as I will die one day. Life expectancies are a dream. Five year plans are wishes. The future does not belong to us. For we “do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (Jas. 4:14).
“Mist” or “breath” is an alternate translation for the refrain of Ecclesiastes often translated as “vanity” or “emptiness,” from the Hebrew hebel. Brian Borgman argues that “breath”―emphasizing the brevity, rather than the meaninglessness, of life―is the better translation. Life is a breath: fleeting, fragile, fast fading. But brief doesn’t have to mean empty or meaningless. At the center of Borgman’s Don’t Waste Your Breath is the truth that life is unyieldingly short and yet beautifully joyful.¹
This summer, I tore through Borgman’s study of Ecclesiastes. As a college student, my slower summer breaks have tended toward reflection. It’s hard to find time to think beyond daily deadlines in the middle of the semester. But away from the relentless beat of school days and weeks, I can find the time and space to wander through the past and present―pondering the last year, dreaming about the next five. I start thinking about what it would be like to start a family, to cook every night, to read leisurely, to live somewhere I have never been before. Life can become more than school.
It is also during these breaks that I most often contemplate the shortness of my life. Summer reminds me how time moves at a breathtaking clip, how major decisions are fast approaching, how my lifespan is so temporary. How did the semester pass so quickly? Is it rest or idleness to not be doing anything “productive”? How have three months of summer gone by already? How much time do I have left to live, anyway? I think about the hazy outlines of my future: working, marriage, parenting, aging. More often, I think about the imminence of death. I was drawn to Don’t Waste Your Breath because Borgman articulates these questions―questions asked by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, questions asked ultimately by God in his inspired Word. I want to, need to, live each moment with death pressing so close. I want to live undeluded, wide awake to sharp reality. I think this is the most honest way to live.
Living with the end in sight is wonderfully clarifying. It reveals what our priorities are. And it changes our priorities. An older friend asked me this summer what I would do if I knew I would die in a year. I said I would spend my time and energy and resources on my local church. I would pursue my unbelieving friends with an almost relentless abandon. I would treasure every moment with the people I love. And I would notice, every day, the clouds in every sky, the blades of grass along every sidewalk, the curve of each distinct tree. I would savor the warmth of sunlight on my shoulders. I would enjoy all the little delights of life: the sweet burst of a ripe peach, the burning in my legs on a jog, the singing of birds in the park.
There is an odd paradox at the heart of living as if the next breath could be your last. If I die tomorrow, the things of this life, this world, cease to be all that important. This earthly existence is temporary. We can take none of it with us into the next life. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return” (Job 1:21). And yet, at the same time, if I die tomorrow, today becomes all the more important. My time is limited. I cannot assume that I will have tomorrow to do what I want. Today―this split second, really―is all I know I have. I dare not devalue it. I dare not waste. Either way, life’s brevity pushes us to reevaluate the ways we spend our time, lest we be the fool who “follows worthless pursuits” (Prov. 12:11, 28:19).
There is, after all, only one thing―one person―of any lasting worth. I think often about Psalm 16:2 (“I have no good apart from you”) and Philippians 3:8 (“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”). Scripture does not let us escape the simple, beautiful, and yet sometimes uncomfortable truth that the only truly necessary thing is knowing and loving Jesus Christ. In him, we have everything. Apart from him, nothing. This is indeed demanding. It is easy, even for believers, to be distracted by the cares of the world, the things that will, in the end, amount to nothing because they do not fuel a greater love for Christ. How easy it is to whittle our time away on worthless pursuits!
Yet this is also gloriously freeing. Life does not have to be so complicated, so rushed and anxious and pulled this way and that. As the uncertainty of the future presses ever closer, I become caught up in silly worries. Will I be good enough at cooking to be a faithful wife? Will I have enough on my resume to make a livable income? Will I know how to change a diaper in time to become a mother? I become like Martha, distracted by good things, whom the Lord describes as “anxious and troubled about many things.” His words to her are not a harsh rebuke, but a kind and gentle invitation toward what really matters, for only “one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:41-42). The one thing―the good portion―is to sit in the presence of the Lord, to listen to his teaching, to receive from him. There is, at the end of the day, only one necessary thing. I need not fret about what I do not need―what the Lord does not require of me here and now.
And so, with the very limited time I have, I dare not wait for tomorrow to seek my only necessity. I have been thinking much about Psalm 90. Perhaps you recall verse 12: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Mostly, however, I have been pondering the request that follows: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Ps. 90:14). A wise numbering of our days, a remembrance of the brevity of our lives, should make us approach each day with a good deal of urgency―urgency not only to be a faithful steward of my work and my abilities, but of my joy. If I knew today to be my last, I would scrape up every last dreg of delight, from the warmth of the sun to the fellowship of my family to the precious promises of the Word. I would not wait to be happy. I would not compromise on joy. I do not know if today will be my last―I don’t expect it is, but it may be. This morning, then, and every morning, I am praying for the Lord to satisfy me with his steadfast love, that I may rejoice and be glad for all the days he has granted by his grace. I know not what number of days are mine, but I dare not waste a single day in melancholy or discontentment or apathy.
As the Preacher in Ecclesiastes instructs us, in a short life, “[t]here is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?” (Eccles. 2:24-25). Enjoyment in this life―eating and drinking and enjoying our toil―is “from the hand of God,” a God-given grace. Most of us have food and drink and work. Many of us are swimming in far greater abundance: a comfortable home, time and money for hobbies, vacation time. But it is one thing to possess a material abundance and another to enjoy what we have. Do we enjoy our earthly blessings? Or do we merely collect them? Borgman writes, “The capacity to enjoy the gifts of God is a gift from God.”²
Cognizant of the brevity of life and the singular worth of joy in the Lord, Jonathan Edwards resolved, with single-minded determination, “to live with all my might, while I do live.”³ This is also my resolution: to live with all the might, all the joy, I can muster each day. If I may pull a phrase out of its original context, I mean to “suck out all the marrow of life.”⁴
For the Lord has made a rich bounty of grace available to us every day. Heed the words of Jeremiah Burroughs: “You have there [in Christ] abundance of treasure to go to and fetch all that you stand in need of.”⁵ It is folly to have such an abundance at our disposal, within reach, at no cost, and at all times, and yet to not enjoy it. It is an unnecessary deprivation of joy. The Lord commands us to “[r]ejoice always” because he has given us all that we need to rejoice (1 Thess. 5:16). Why do we not? Why do we risk wasting today, which may be our last day on earth?
If I wake up again tomorrow, if only by the grace of God, I will ask him, again, to satisfy me in the morning with his steadfast love, that I may rejoice and be glad all my days―however many or few my days may be.
Brian Borgman, Don’t Waste Your Breath (Free Grace Press, 2024).
Borgman, Don’t Waste Your Breath, 59.
Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2001), 17.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (San Diego: Printers Row, 2014), 67.
Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (Moscow: Canon Press, [1645] 2002), 258.