This trip, we went to Mykonos for the one and only time.
We got off the ship and walked the streets for the one and only time. We bought some coffee and took some photos. We breathed sea air, and we pet some cats. Then we returned to the ship and sailed away.
That was the one and only time those things will ever happen just like that, because life never repeats itself. Those moments will never happen again, not like that. This moment will never come again. It’s the nature of time. And faithfulness depends on this truth.
Without it, abiding is impossible because abiding, at its core, requires an awareness of time—of its movement, its unidirectional flow, and its adamant refusal to repeat itself.
Every second passes only once, and that is the second you have been given in which to abide. To abide is to recognize that mercy, obedience, and love must be offered in real time, before the moment disappears forever.
When you realize that today will never return, that this conversation, this choice, this chance to love or obey will never appear in quite the same way, you start to live inside His presence instead of in your past or imagined future.
When we move through life like it’s on endless repeat—another day, another chance, another season—we get careless. Maybe we put off obedience, we postpone tenderness, or we make peace with half-hearted devotion. But when we grasp that each moment is a one-time thing, abiding suddenly has urgency. And most importantly, it stops being about performance and starts being about love.
Even the smallest acts—kindness to a stranger, restraint in a moment of anger, prayer in the darkest night- gain a kind of eternal weight when you remember they can’t be redone. Each moment carries the potential for a single seed to be sown, one that will bear fruit forever.
Maybe it’s more vivid when you are traveling to places you literally have never been before and will never be again, but it’s a good illustration anyway of the power of time. It’s always moving you someplace new, isn’t it? So, today we have the opportunity to show up fully to what God has placed before us in this moment, not tomorrow or last week, because this moment, this exact one, will never exist again. And it exists now for a purpose. Eternity is being written right now. Don’t scroll past it, live in it today!