It’s easy, when we are young, to assume that we have time. Life is a long journey whose minutes are slow and years are fast. With 30 or 40 years left in our life expectancy, putting off the difficult and important things is preferable to encountering challenges. Actuarial tables concur with our assessment, until the flood waters come.

The early Christians, right after the Resurrection, believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent. The general thinking was that it would happen in their lifetimes. Now, more than 50 generations later, we are still waiting. There have been horrific events in these last millennia, but none of them have culminated in the second coming.

Complacency is a dangerous thing, because it gets us to turn off our brains. In a false sense of security, we engage in moral hazard. We make decisions that we otherwise would not make. If we knew the date and time of our death, we would order our lives very differently.

In his famous satire, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis articulates many of the strategies that ensnare Christians seeking to achieve the greatness they were made to live. One of them is that evil doesn’t exist but, perhaps more insidious, is the idea that we have more time.

A wave of canonizations is upon us of young people who lived lives of heroic virtue, but didn’t make it to 25. It doesn’t have to take us a lifetime to embrace God’s great plan for our lives; we don’t have to spend decades wandering in the wilderness like Israel. The fullness of God’s revelation is in our pockets on our cell phones, and written on our hearts.

It’s never too late to do the right thing, and tomorrow is not assured. The response to this is not fear or dread, but gratitude. Gratitude for the blessings of today, and earnestness to pursue greatness now.