Making the Most of Life

Making the Most of Life

The Meaning of Opportunities

Excerpts from J.R. Miller

The real problem of living, therefore, is how to take what the hours bring. He who does this, will live nobly and faithfully, and will fulfill God’s plan for his life. The difference in men is not in the opportunities that come to them, but in their use of their opportunities. Many people who fail to make much of their life, charge their failure to the lack of opportunities. They look at one who is continually doing good and beautiful things, or great and noble things, and think that he is specially favoured, that the chances which come to him for such things are exceptional. Really, however, it is in his capacity for seeing and accepting what the hours bring of duty or privilege that his success lays. Where other men see nothing, he sees a battle to fight, a duty to perform, a service to render, or an honour to win. Many a man waits long for opportunities, wondering why they never come to him, when really they have been passing by him day after day, unrecognized and unaccepted.

"They perish, and are set down to our account”

There is something truly startling in this irreparableness of the past, this irrevocableness of the losses which we have suffered through our follies or our sins. About two centuries ago a great sun dial was erected in All Soul’s College, Oxford, England, the largest and noblest dial; it is said, in the whole kingdom. Over the long pointer were written, in large letters of gold, the Latin words, referring to the hours, “Pereunt et imputantur.” Literally the meaning is, “They perish, and are set down to our account” or, as they have been rendered in terser phrase, “They are wasted, and are added to our debt.”

It is said that these words on the dial have exerted a wonderful influence on the boyhood of many of the distinguished men who have received their training at Oxford, stimulating them to the most conscientious use of the golden hours as they passed, and bearing fruit in long lives of earnestness and faithfulness. The lesson is one that every young person should learn. In youth the hours are full of privileges. They come like angels, holding in their hands rich treasures, sent to us from God, which they offer to us; and if we are laggard or indolent, or if we are too intent on our own little trifles to give welcome to these heavenly messengers with their heavenly gifts, they quickly pass on and are gone. And they never come back again to renew the offer.
On the dial of a clock in the palace of Napoleon at Malmaison, the maker has put the words, “Non nescit reverti”; “It does not know how to go backward.” It is so of the great clock of Time – it never can be turned backward. The moments come to us but once; whatever we do with them we must do as they pass, for they will never come to us again.

"Then privilege makes responsibility."

We shall have to give account to God for all that he sends to us by the mystic hands of the passing hours, and which we refuse or neglect to receive. “They are wasted and are added to our debt.”