This past Sunday, Al showed up at church. I hadn’t seen him for quite some time. The last time he’d been in church, he’d been part of a jail program, coming each Sunday with a tracking bracelet on his ankle. This time his arm was in a sling, and he was wearing a brace on his foot.

When I greeted him, he asked me, “Did you hear the news? Sheila passed away.”

I was shocked. Sheila had been Al’s girlfriend, an exuberant, larger-than-life sort of woman who always called me “Honey” and gave me big hugs that engulfed me in the smell of smoke. I’d had the chance to pray with her on more than one occasion, and the news was shocking.

Al’s eyes began to fill with tears as he told me that she’d gone to sleep and never woken up. It had happened over a month ago, but he’d only recently found out about it since he was back in the jail program.

“I never should’ve stopped coming here,” he said. “I was feeling good when I was here. I was doing good.” He proceeded to tell me that after he’d left, he’d stopped taking his medication, started drinking again and had gotten into more trouble with the law, landing himself back in the program.

“Is Pastor Jon here?” he asked.

I had to break the news to him that only three weeks prior Pastor Jon, our beloved associate pastor, had moved to New York to become senior pastor at another church.

Al looked saddened by the news. “He was a good man,” he said.

As we stood there in that moment, I realized how fleeting time is and how much change can occur in the blink of an eye. The ones we love are alive, then they are dead. Friends live around the corner, then they have packed up and moved away. Members of our congregations are doing well, walking the straight and narrow, and then they’re in the pit. And it all happens so quickly. Or so it seems.

How long ago was it now since I had seen Al and Sheila? I don’t know. It feels like it may have been only a few short months, but maybe it was much more.

Time has a way of playing tricks on us. Despite the fact that we often feel time rushing by faster than we’d like in the midst of our busy, jam-packed days, somehow we always feel like there will be enough of it available to us at some undetermined point in the future.

I think of the people to whom I have said, “Oh, we would like to have you over for dinner sometime soon.” I say this with the best of intentions. I truly do want to invite them to our home and mean to do so. However, embarrassingly enough, I think there are some people to whom I have said this over a year ago now and who I still have not managed to get to our home because other things kept popping up on the calendar. One of these was probably Pastor Jon and his family who I spent seven years ministering alongside.

In the back of my mind I’d be thinking, “Well, there’s always next month;” but then change moved in like a flood, and now next month is not an option, at least not with them. The opportunity came and went — and now it’s gone.

The crazy thing is we live in a world of change, so we should be used to it by now. You’d think we’d come to expect it. Instead, change almost always takes us by surprise. It blindsides us.

All of this serves as a reminder that we are not promised tomorrow. We cannot put off for tomorrow what needs to be done today. We cannot keep telling ourselves that we’ll make the time for the important things in the future. Time is not in our hands. We must treasure it and use it wisely while we have the chance.