I was reading the funnies yesterday and “The Other Coast” had a comic about some people catching rainwater in a barrel from the gutter of their roof.  A squirrel had washed into the barrel. (That was the joke.)

As I looked at the panel I was carried back to my Ohio childhood, when my dad rigged up a barrel to catch rainwater.  We lived out in the country and our water was held in a cistern. We had to have water delivered in a big pump truck every few months, so we considered the rain barrel a smart economic move.

The picture in the comic actually looked like a caricature of our house and rain barrel, so it didn’t seem that funny to me. But it brought out some wonderful reminiscing.

We also ate squirrels that my dad shot in our woods, but to my knowledge we never caught one in the rain barrel.

Looking at the comic, I wondered how old Adrian Raeside is. Drinking rainwater and eating squirrel just didn’t seem that odd to me.  And then suddenly it hit me — I was shocked to realize my rainwater barrel and squirrel eating days were 50 years ago!

More than 50 years actually.  Gulp!

I remember so many conversations with our good friend Peggy Kilmer, who was in her nineties.  Peggy would laughingly sigh and say, “Sometimes I catch sight of myself in a mirror and say ‘Who is that old lady?’ I still feel the same as I ever did.”

Miss Peggy, I can relate!

One of my favourite songs is Jim Croce’s haunting Time in a Bottle… “But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them…”

This is true, but more to the point I love C.S. Lewis’s thoughts about time.  We live in time and it’s all we really know, but we’re always shocked at the passage of time. (I can hardly believe my grandson already three years old!)  Lewis says it’s because we know, deep down, that we’re not supposed to get old and die. God made us for a timeless existence.  Our natural element is eternity.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has set eternity in our hearts…that none of us can fathom what all he has done, and that he makes everything beautiful in its time.  Wow!

So with eternity set in my heart, I’m going to remind myself of one more thing C.S Lewis said. The present – right now – is the point at which time touches eternity. So I want to make the most of this eternal moment! Carpe Diem!