Oh, don’t let me think about what this is heading for or how heavy and weighty it is to have one life.ĪLSO READ: The Lamb vs. I don’t know what it’s about, just coasting, just doing the next thing, just putzing around, desperately trying to be happy while not thinking. Now as I approach my last years waning, My search I must begin again.”Īnd everything in me in those days toward the end of high school was saying, that must never, never, never happen, come to the end of life – 65 right now – and say, I can’t figure it out. “Long I sought for the earth’s hidden meaning. It’s called The Lost Years, and in the verse, the last verse goes like this: It’s written from the perspective of being an old man.

So that poem was published and in it there’s a verse. And the quality of the poem makes no difference to me whatsoever now, but looking back on it, the burden of it is what grips me because it was an evidence of that coming alive of the sense of I’ve got one life - one life, and I can blow it forever or not. In 1964, we had a high school literary magazine called Leaves of Grass, and I published a mediocre poem in it. It was an awakening of the wonder and the weight of having one life to live, and then its outcome for eternity, no second chances, no retakes like when you do a video, no do-overs in a test – one life and then eternity. I was already walking with Jesus, and so it wasn’t faith that came alive. Something came alive that has never died. God was very kind to me when I was 17 years old in high school. John Piper’s talk titled “Don’t Waste Your Life” which was presented at the 2011 National Conference, Light & Heat: A Passion for the Holiness of God

Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper