Overtime Before Timeover

Canada played USA in the finals of the World Cup Junior Hockey tonight. The game extended to overtime. I wonder if you interviewed the team if they would say they played harder in overtime or at the beginning of the game? Even though their bodies are completely spent and they feel exhausted their minds and hearts engage to give it all them have.

Almost like Sudden Death, they play every second to the max. Do we do that in life? Do we look around us at the Tim Hortons or next to our locker? Do we give the best efforts in our assignments, in our listening and conversations to our family members? It is what we are entrusted with to which we are accountable to play full out in. God's not looking for us to be millionaires or invent the world wide web, He simply is desiring that the people and assignments around us are touched and influenced by the best we can give them.

Trust me, I'm often guilty of not giving it my all several times in a day. There are times I miss, or times I completely bomb or blow, BUT I do take the next chance to score, catching up, and tying the game so God gives me the clean slate to play in overtime, full out.

I'll never forget the time my Vice President at TELUS took me aside at our President's Council trip and the second sentence he ever said to me was "So What makes Carrie Simpson so successful?" In haste, shock, fear and a desire to please and impress I responded with "relationships".

Later that night I went to my room and wept for I knew it was God who was blessing me so richly and I didn't want to fear saying that even to someone who didn't know God. I told God then, that I was sincerely sorry and if given the chance again I wouldn't shy away from giving Him all the glory. Indeed this time came again and "YES" I played and scored well in this overtime period for our Lord. :)

God knows we need many chances, we are frail and human. His words to describe us are "mists in His nostrils". (Isaiah 2:22) Or better yet like grass of the fields in which our glory is like flowers. The grass will wither and the flowers fall. (1 Peter 1:24)

Overtime doesn't last long. Neither do the few days that we call "LIFE". Therefore let's be motivated even today to give it all we got. Perhaps a smile, buying someone lunch, surprising someone by shovelling their driveway, waiting an extra 2 minutes to hold the door for the person in the distance, to write a long overdue letter of appreciation to someone who least expects it, throwing on some extra pasta and inviting a lonely, or sad person to join your family for dinner, surprising your kids with a hot lunch from their favorite spot brought to their school, putting a flower in the car or desk of someone special, maybe it's buying an extra coffee and giving it to the homeless guy sitting outside, maybe it's emailing a verse to someone that it reminds you of, the list goes on and on...

King David Wrote:
Show me, O LORD, my life's end
and the number of my days;
let me know how fleeting is my life.

5 You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you.
Each man's life is but a breath. (Psalm 39:4,5)

Is it depressing for me to think of life as a breath of overtime?? If King David, who had everything could pen words of such, it will do me well to live LIFE in such a motivated state.

When the Canadian and USA teams went into overtime they KNEW this was it. They played in such a manner.

Today, I shall choose to play as if in OVERTIME.

Overtime vs Timeover.