At the end of your life you will groan, when your flesh and body are spent. – Proverbs 5:11

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 19, 2016): Proverbs 5

When I was young, smoking was cool. In school, it seemed that every kid was somehow involved in the practice. And it wasn’t the naturally available substitutes with which other children from previous generations had started. We simply went down to the store with some money (and back then it wasn’t very much money – a lot of my friends vowed to quit smoking when the price of cigarettes reached a dollar a pack) and told the clerk that mom wants her Players or Export A cigarettes. Or you could find an unattended vending machine with cigarettes in it that would never look down on how old you were.

But even then we knew that smoking was bad for you. I don’t know of any of my smoking childhood friends that thought that smoking was a good and healthy way to live. It was simply the cool way to live. The line that we heard was that every cigarette took ten minutes off of your life. It seemed like a great line, so I used it a few times myself. And every time the response was the same. “I don’t want to live until I am sick, I want to die younger but healthy so losing ten minutes off of my life is not all that important an issue.” Of course, we know that that isn’t the way that it works. I am not sure where the “ten minutes” comes from, but the reality is that our cigarettes may cost us those “ten minutes” but it also costs us a lot of unnecessary pain and sickness at the end of our lives. If you want to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse, smoking is not the way to get that done.  

Cigarettes do not stand alone. Weight, alcohol, sleep patterns, drugs and other things take a toll on our health and the length of our lives. The way we use our time takes a toll on what we get accomplished in our lifetime. Sometimes I think God should have given us a dry run so that we could figure out what life is like and what it takes to accomplish our dreams. And then we would have been ready for the real thing. Instead, we get one kick at this thing called life, and everything that we do contributes to our success or demise, our further life or our approaching death.

Part of the problem is that when we are young, there is so much time ahead of us to do the important things. What no one tells us is that there isn’t a bell that rings that remind us it is time to get serious. Health mistakes when we are young are not freebies that have no impact on later life. And the day will come, for most of us sooner than we want it, when we will begin to pay for our mistakes. Take care of your life, and your life (and body) will take care of you as you grow older, indulge in the things that hurt the body, mind, and soul, and at the end of your life you will groan, when your flesh and body are spent.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Proverbs 6