I speak often about the importance of living life one day at a time and I’ve given away hundreds of tracts with a poem about it. But we also need to consider the connection of one day with the others. In speaking of this, nobody has done it better than J. R. Miller who wrote the following in 1913:
It is a good thing to learn to live by the day. We should devote all our strength to the doing well of each day’s tasks — and then should disengage ourselves altogether from its entanglements. Emerson puts it well: “Finish every day — and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely; and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. Today is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its, hopes and invitations — to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
Yet as important as is the duty of fencing off the days and keeping them separate — there is a sense in which no day stands alone. The days are links in an endless chain. Each day receives an inheritance from yesterday, and at its close passes it down to the day which comes after. We start every new day with the memories of all our days trailing after us. We have all the knowledge gathered during the years that are gone. We have also the experience of the past by which our lives have been enriched, or possibly hurt. We are bound up, too, in the associations and friendships which have been formed. In countless ways, yesterday’s life and today’s are intertangled. Each day is but a little section of a great web, containing one figure of the pattern, the warp running through all the days and years. A life is a serial story, opening with infancy, closing with death, and each day is one little chapter in the story.
We best prepare for tomorrow, when we make today beautiful with truth and faithfulness. Today is the blossom — tomorrow is the fruit. Today is the sowing — tomorrow is the harvest. Far more than we realize, does tomorrow depend upon today. The Bible has its promises of divine care and provision; yet all such promises imply our faithfulness in duty as the condition of their fulfillment. A link dropped in the chain of obedience and fidelity will mean a break in the continuity of the blessing. Every minute is a key which, when touched, strikes a note somewhere in the future. If the touch is a true one — it will help to make music of love and joy. If it is a wrong touch — it will make a discord in the melody of life.
