Life moves faster than we expect.
If you’ve ever stood at the bedside of someone nearing the end of their life, or even just imagined that moment, you begin to notice a common thread. There is often a quiet realization that everything has passed in what feels like an instant. Time, which once felt abundant, suddenly feels impossibly short. Whether there is peace or regret, the same truth remains: it is over.
Scripture describes this reality plainly. James asks, “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14). The psalmist echoes this, reflecting that even at our best state, we are only a breath before God: “Indeed, You have made my days as handbreadths, And my age is as nothing before You; Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor” (Psalm 39:4–5). Our lives may reach seventy or even eighty years, but, as Psalm warns, they are “soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10,12). Like grass that flourishes in the morning and fades by evening, our days do not linger (Psalm 103:15–16).
And yet, we live as though they do.
We speak of “my time,” “my plans,” “my life,” and grow frustrated when those things are interrupted. But that language reveals more than habit—it reveals assumption. We assume ownership.
C. S. Lewis confronts this directly in The Screwtape Letters: “The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his [own].”
He also examines the meaning of “my” through the example of a child and a teddy bear. Originally, when a child said “my teddy bear,” it expressed a relationship: the bear was to be the object of their affection. But over time, that meaning is corrupted. The child begins to treat “my bear” as an object to do with as they please, claiming control rather than love. In the same way, we take what God has given– our bodies, our time, our very lives– and treat them as ours to manipulate, rather than gifts to cherish and steward.
But Scripture corrects this assumption clearly. “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit… and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Our very lives do not ultimately belong to us, they belong to God.
If we are not owners but stewards, then time is not something we control but something entrusted to us. The question is no longer how we spend what is “ours,” but how we use what has been given.
Ecclesiastes reinforces this reality: “What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time, also He has put eternity in their hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:9–11). Our work, our time, our lives are not random, they are God-given tasks. The life He entrusts to us is meant to be occupied in obedience and for His purpose. Even joy and goodness flow from faithfully living within that task, not from self-directed control.
And yet, there is a battle. Lewis concludes with sobering clarity: “They will find out in the end, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong—certainly not to them” (The Screwtape Letters). Our lives are fought for, and in the end, they belong either to God or to satan.
Life is a vapor. Time is a gift, and it is given with purpose.
The question is not whether your life belongs to someone.
The question is who it belongs to, and what you are doing with the gift while the battle is being waged.
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