Tempus Fugit—Life Demands Its Moment

Three hundred years before Christ, the Greek polymath, Archimedes, developed a cruel invention…the clock.

It took the 20th century before we realized its tyranny.

We have a grandmother clock in our home that doesn’t work. Engraved on the face is the Latin phrase “Tempus fugit,” meaning “time flies.”

Have you wondered where the time goes? As I write this, we are already 39 days into 2025. Didn’t I just put up the Christmas tree?

If time has wings, why do we treat it like a bird in a cage?

How many people say, “I have plenty of time to file my tax return” and then rush to the only open post office on April 18th to mail at the last minute?

The college student gets his syllabus at the beginning of the semester. The term paper is due in 12 weeks, but some students need an extension. One coed called him at 10 pm on the last possible day to ask, “What was the topic I was supposed to write about?”

Everyone procrastinates now and then, but one man made it a habit.

Samuel Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. It was said of him, “Never did so great a mind produce so little.”

He left Cambridge University to join the army. He left the army because he could not rub down a horse. He returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman, which lived for ten numbers and then died. One writer commented, “He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done.

Coleridge had every poetic gift except one—the gift of concentrated effort. In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said, himself, “completed save for transcription. I am on the even,” he says, “of sending to the press two octavo volumes.”

But the books were never composed outside Coleridge’s mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out.

No one ever reached any peak, and no one, having reached it, ever maintained it, without discipline. Coleridge was living proof that a man or woman may have enormous intelligence and remarkable communicative gifts, and yet end up squandering it all because of an inability to seize control of time.

Why does fleeting time flitter away so easily?

Opportunities come but many fall by the wayside because we think of a tomorrow.

As part of his long appellate march to Rome, Paul appeals before a magistrate named Felix.

Felix is a wicked man. He was not above killing off his brother to steal his wife.

As Paul spoke, his heart trembled.

“And as he reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, “Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity I will summon you.” (Acts 24:25, ESV)

Paul’s message seemed lost on Felix. He believed he had another day, a better season. The time would come…and go.

His ignored moment became a lost eternity.

The truth of the clock remains. If time flies, take it seriously. There is only one convenient time…that’s right now.

If you won’t do it today, you never will. The best time is now.

So pick up your phone. Write that email. Hold that child. Begin that project. The clock on our wall keeps ticking, marking each passing moment that will never return. But it also reminds us of something beautiful – that right now, in this moment, we have the power to act, to change, to begin.

The time is always now.