Some Things You’ve Just Got to Do Now

Get church bulletin articles like this
in your inbox weekly! Subscribe today!

[324 words]

Thomas Carlyle was a famous writer. His wife Jane died suddenly of a heart attack while he was away in Scotland delivering an inaugural address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University. History says that Carlyle was so busy with his writing that some days he wouldn’t even take the time out to visit his wife. After her funeral, Carlyle returned to her bedroom and sat down next to her bed and began to read from her diary. He was startled as he read what she wrote. She said, “Yesterday, he spent an hour with me, and it was like being in heaven.” She wrote, “I love him so.” On the next page, she wrote, “I have listened all day to hear his steps in the hall. But now it is late, and I guess he won’t come today.” Carlyle read on for another half dozen pages or so. He then threw the book down and rushed back to the cemetery in the rain. His friends later found him in the cemetery, facedown in the mud of her grave. He was weeping and repeatedly saying, “If I had only known, if I had only known.” That day was the beginning of the saddest part of his life. In his own diary, there is a sentence that is said to be the saddest in English literature. It goes this way. “Oh, if I had you yet but for five minutes by my side that I might tell you all.”

Some things you’ve got to do now while you have the opportunity. Such as it is with our salvation, Saul of Tarsus was asked these words in Acts 22:16, “And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name.’”

Today is all you have; tomorrow may not come. When the opportunity presents itself, you’ve got to do it now because you may not get that opportunity again.

Mark T. Tonkery
Bates Hill church of Christ
Zanesville, OH