We reach a certain age, and we start to wonder if we’ve wasted our lives, if our lives have had any meaning. We wonder, we fret, if enough time remains to correct course if we have, indeed, wasted the gift of time.

Now consider this: have multitudes passed through this life who absolutely wasted their lives? They were unmotivated/unwell/unsupported non-doers who just took up space, produced nothing — not a healthy child, a garden patch, an improved social condition (markers of success, per Ralph Waldo Emerson). Maybe some non-doers actually made life worse.

Did God not have a plan and purpose for them? What if, at the last moment, those unsaved non-doers accepted the light of Christ and are spending eternity in heaven? Here’s the truth: God’s ways are not our ways. What we see as value, as purposeful, as a redeemed condition, a well-raised child, a garden patch, God sees with holy eyes. We see with the eyes of a child. He sees with omniscience. We do not yet entirely know what He considers good and a well-done job.

Surely, God has welcomed many non-doers at the gate with, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” Perhaps we, who seek earnestly, rabidly, to achieve purpose, need to shift focus from judgment of wasted lives to loving through God’s eyes.