A Thousand Marbles

There is a story going around about a man who sat down one morning as he drank his cup of coffee (postum) and listened to the radio. Over the radio waves came the voice of a man who had developed a philosophy about the priorities of life. He called it his "Thousand Marbles" theory. It went something like this:

The average person lives to be seventy-five years old. Some a little more, some a little less, but on average, seventy-five years. He multiplied seventy-five times fifty-two and he came up with thirty-nine hundred. That was the number of Saturdays (Sabbaths) or individual days of a week the average person has in their entire lifetime. It took him fifty-five years to come to that realization. So by that time he had lived through twenty-eight hundred Saturdays (Sabbaths).

So he went to the toy store and bought every single marble they had, he actually had to go to four different toy stores to find that many. He took them home and put them in a large clear plastic jar and set it up in plain sight for every one to see. Every Saturday morning, he took out one marble and threw it away. It represented a day he could choose to spend and be a blessing to his family in some special way or he could choose not to, but either way it was gone forever.

He found that by watching the number of marbles diminish, he was able to focus on the really important things in life. "There is nothing like watching your time here on earth run out to help you get your priorities straight," he said. The day that fact of life hit him, he grabbed his wife by the hand and they did something that was special to them.

The day finally came when he took the last of the thousand marbles out of the container. He and his wife went out to eat remembering that if God gave him until the next Sabbath to be with his loved ones, that would be just a little more "grace time" to be with those who mattered most to him. Work and other responsibilities would have to be set aside for another time.

As I write this I am reminded of a special man I have known for over thirty years whose wife of nearly sixty years died literally in a "heart beat." One moment she was alive and enjoying her husband. The next moment she was gone. That or similar experiences are replicated annually in the thousands across our land. Shock, pain and loss invade peoples lives every day in scenes like this. Homes and churches are filled with people who are achingly lonely, victims of death, divorce and distance from loved ones. The moral of the story is that you should be especially kind and loving to your family and friends while you can before you lose all your marbles.