What's Luke Thinking?

I recently had the pleasure of working the fourth commencement ceremony during my time at Marshall University. One ceremony is held at the end of each semester, so this has totaled two years of working during these ceremonies and watching people graduate. During my first week at Marshall, I signed a banner that said “Class of 2025,” expecting it to be a soon-to-be-forgotten photo op. Little did I know, during each of these ceremonies, I would see the graduating class’s banners from their own first weeks on campus. I now regret not taking note of where I signed my name, but this has also brought another common topic to my attention in a deeper light: the speed of time.

In the first three ceremonies, I found myself looking at the years on the banner and thinking “Wow. One day that’ll be my banner hanging, but I have time until then.” The fourth time, however, was slightly different. Instead, I found myself thinking “Wow. One day that’ll be my banner hanging. It’s 2023 now, so I have two years until it’s my turn… two years?!” I couldn’t believe how fast two years had gone by compared to the first two years of my time in high school, which was a crawl. I always knew that time went faster as I got older thanks to the wise words of the many old folks around me telling me to “Enjoy it while you can.” I just never expected it to get faster at such an accelerating rate.

Anytime I think about this topic, it reminds me of a phrase I heard my dad say once, and as strange as it is, it has stuck with me for years. It’s a phrase that sounds like it should be prefaced with a “You ain’t redneck if you ain’t heard”, but I believe it’s far too valuable to be taken so lightly, and today its value only increased to me.

“Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes,” my father said, without a blink or moment’s hesitation, while I stood dumbfounded at the fact that he compared life to something that is used for… well, you know what toilet paper is used for.

As I’ve gone through my own “roll of TP,” I’ve realized how true that phrase is, especially when realizing my Bachelor’s graduation is only two years away. With that, however, came another realization. My surprise when first hearing the comparison was due to how something so valuable, life, was being compared to something you’d find on the floor of a public restroom (although I now believe it’s far more valuable than I did at the time – I’m very picky about my TP). What is even more of a surprise is that I believe everyone would agree that life is more valuable than TP, but not everyone treats the two in that manner.

When the roll begins disappearing faster, and the user becomes aware, each piece becomes immensely more valuable and is used to its fullest extent. It isn’t simply accepted that it’s flying by and if they run out… oops. They know what happens if they’re not careful with what they have left. In life, this same principle should be applied, but many miss out on it. Sure, time goes faster, so we realize the true value of each moment, but do we truly use each moment to its fullest extent? Many simply accept the fate that time is leaving in a flash, and let the days, weeks, months, and years run together, forgetting how valuable each of those moments is, and simply biding their time until their time is up.

I hope to not let the days turn into weeks into months into years and even into decades, and realizing this so early, I plan to make life slow down just a little bit. If we all used the TP at the beginning of the roll the same way we do at the end, we’d feel a little different by the time we got there. Furthermore, imagine if we never ran out of TP until we didn’t need it anymore. How differently could we use it then?

“Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. For you are just a vapor that appears for a little while, and then vanishes away.” James 4:14