Have you ever heard someone say something like, “He was having the time of his life?” The time of his life. What an odd group of words. What is the TIME of a person's life?When you are going along, day in and day out, there is a numbing normalcy to the time of one's life. One day flows into another. We get caught up in the sequence of events and hypnotised by their repetitive nature. Monday precedes Tuesday. Thursday follows Wednesday. It happens like that every time, and as we are floating down the current of time doing this or that, it just seems like one day will always follow another. That is one argument against the return of Jesus. Where is the promise of His return? One day follows another without interruption and it's been that way for millennia. Doomsday predictions come and go, but the time of life continues.Until it ends. In spite of threats from asteroids and global warming, the world seems to go on and on, but individual people do not. The time of our lives keeps flowing until it falls off a cliff in time and descends in a rush of death. Someone once said that one out of one will die. Until we face death, however, it just seems as if our lives will keep going on.My youngest brother was driving home from playing a gig at Disney World when an old woman in a car going the opposite direction on the freeway died at the wheel of her car, allowing her car to drift across the divider and hit his car directly on the driver's side door. That knocked my brother out instantly, and he bled out in minutes. That happened in 1996. The time of his life came to an end. The clock on his earthly life stopped.Recently, a friend developed a brain tumour. When its effects became unavoidable, she was flown off the Island to be with family, and that whole process took a handful of days. It might as well have been a few minutes, because it all seemed so sudden.In the Bible a rich man decided one day to tear down all his barns in order to build bigger ones and make more money. He was pronounced a fool, because that night his life was required of him, and all his grand schemes and plans amounted to nothing. The time of his life had come to an end.Time can be calculated quantitatively or qualitatively how long one has to live or how well one can live regardless of how long one has to live. When I would walk to the bus stop on the way to school at the age of about 13, I used to think that I would probably not live past 27. Why that number I have no idea. Well, obviously 27 came and went. In fact it has come and gone a couple of times. During that time I feel as if I have lived several different lifetimes, because I have done so many things and had such varied experiences. I've worked line staff at residential treatment of children and adolescents. Before that I took care of psychologically disordered combat veterans fresh back from the Vietnam war and I've lived in Berkeley, California as a hippie (dodging the tear gas during anti-war demonstrations). I've been a minister on the multiple staff of a large (2,500) church in central California, and I've pastored a small, rural church along the Oregon coast. I've participated in the birth of all three children, held one in hands before his umbilical cord was cut, played with them when they were small, and baptised all three as they grew up. I've lived way back up in the mountains, beside a river that would periodically flood, and I've crawled in the ice to thaw out the water pump that brought spring-fed water into the house. I've watched a hundred elk graze in the pasture right behind our house and I've seen eagles fly in from fishing at the coast. I've cut and split seven cords of wood at a time, and to this day I love the smell of fresh cut wood, especially fir. I've been a road manager for a rock band that played an average of 16 shows each week for nine months, while living on the road in motels and eating at restaurants; we ended up in Toronto, and so I've also visited Niagara Falls (on a rare day off). I've driven across the United States three times. I completed a doctoral programme in clinical psychology. I've completed a dual residency in psychotherapy and organisational development. I've presented at international conferences in the United States, Australia, Belgium, England, Canada, Italy, Greece, and Argentina. I've been married more than once and divorced. I've been homeless. I've lived in beautiful and even luxurious surroundings. I've seen both parents die. I've been in a movie (‘Kindergarten Cop') with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I've written or edited four books.It is not how long a person lives but how well a person lives that makes for the time of one's life. Furthermore, all any of us have is right now; so, what matters most is what you are doing with this present moment. Daniel Stern wrote a whole book about it in 2004 titled ‘The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life'. Mindfulness and Acceptance therapies, very popular right now and assimilated by cognitive-behavioural therapy, centre on awareness and simple acceptance of the current moment what it's like to be you right now.Most people do not pay attention to what it's like to be them at any given current moment. They are too busy regretting the past or worrying about the future. Gestalt therapy has long held that if a person were to become aware of what he or she is doing in the current moment and how he or she is doing that, to actualise one's self in the here-and-now, then that person would change. Change and growth are inevitable given mindful awareness and acceptance of what is. And that all leads to a better quality of life, because people are then paying attention to what is important to them. They become aware of the time of their life.