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Living God's Priorities
by Melanie Williams

(I read this a few days before Kela passed away and it really struck me powerfully because God has been working on me in the area of Priorities.  As a wife, mom, dance teacher, and youth leader I've got a lot going on and it's easy to get caught up in urgent things & miss the important things.  At 40, you'd expect me to be introspective about how I spend my time - but with Kela living just a short 22, I hope it's a wake up call for all of us.  It is never too soon to be living God's priorities.)

"I bought a brand new date book yesterday . . . pages and pages of blank boxes.  Every square has a number to tell me which day of the month I'm in at the moment.  Every square is a frame for one episode of my life.  Before I'm through with the book, I will fill the squares with classes I will teach, people with whom I ate lunch, everlasting committee meetings I sit through, and these are only the things I cannot afford to forget.  I fill the squares too with things I do not write down to remember: Thousands of cups of coffee, some praying, and I hope, gestures of help to my neighbors.  Whatever I do, it has to fit inside one of those square on my date book.  I live one square at a time.  The four lines that make up the box are the walls of time that organize my life.  Each box has an invisible door that leads to the next square.  As if by silent stroke, the door opens and I am pulled through, as if by a magnet, sucked into the next square in line.  There I will again fill the time frame that seals me - fill it with my busy-ness just as I did the square before.  As I get older, the squares seem to get smaller.  One day I will walk into a square that has no door.  There will be no mysterious opening and no walking into an adjoining square.  One of those squares will be terminal.  I do not know which square it will be."

The author ends the chapter this way, ". . . and our real life, far from being over, turns out to have just begun. The last square is an opening into a new world where God will set everything right.  One day you will enter it, and so will I.  In the meantime, fill your squares wisely."