Let's pray together.

We bow, Father, before you and acknowledge with tremendous exhilaration and trembling that you are holy.

There isn't anything greater that can be said of you than that you are holy.

How I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the legacy of that proclamation in Ligonier.

And I pray now that as I undertake to articulate the unwasted life, you would grant me a spirit

of reverence in the face of your holiness. Would you come and minister to this people so that whether they are young or old,

they would resolve in the Holy Spirit never to waste the rest of their lives.

I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

God was very kind to me when I was 17 years old in high school.

Something came alive. I can almost pinpoint the class,

Mrs. Clanton's class in English.

Something came alive that has never died.

I was already walking with Jesus,

and so it wasn't faith that came alive.

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.

In 1964, we had a high school literary magazine called Leaves of Grass, and I published a mediocre poem in it.

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 a sense of I've got one life one life and I can blow it forever or not so that poem was

published and in it there's a verse it's written from the perspective of being an old man. I'm 17 years old when I'm writing it.

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