Since joining Facebook, I discovered something unanticipated.  When I left high school and college, I unconsciously retained mental snapshots of my old friends and classmates.  In short, I thought I knew what they looked like.

Friending “old” friends on Facebook demonstrated—sometimes very starkly—something I knew in theory but never fully grasped in reality: somewhere over the past thirty-plus years, we all became genuinely old.  Looking at the profile pictures, I sometimes found myself silently asking, “What happened to you?”  Even more telling was the next logical query: “What happened to me?”

Sure, some of the guys still had most of their hair and others managed to keep most of the weight off, but thirty-plus years had taken a tremendous toll on us all.  It’s a helpful reminder, really, of something too easily forgotten or ignored.  When you are young and strong and beautiful, every new day seems a lot like the day before. You may have made some stupid and immoral decisions yesterday, but youth often enables you to bounce back rather quickly and with minimal effort.  However, after more than three decades, all that bouncing has left behind an increasingly weighty list of aches, pains, scars, wrinkles, and regrets.

While contemplating this, I came across Isaiah 56:12 which says, “Come, . . . let me get wine; let us fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure.”  The attitude is essentially this: we can fill each day with drunkenness and strong drink because tomorrow will be just like today—another day to party and have a good time.  It will always be like this.  Life will never catch up to us.

Thirty years and the Facebook time-warp has rather unceremoniously ripped off the illusory mask. Tomorrow keeps on coming.  Sooner or later, tomorrow is no longer just “like this day.”  Today’s tomorrows become weeks, months, years, and decades.  The daily choices we make—good, bad, and neutral—exact a small but growing (and ultimately measurable) price.  It’s more obvious than ever: none of us will live forever.  Each today is decidedly not the same as yesterday.

In light of our increasingly evident mortality, I thank God that each tomorrow will not be “like this day.”  No matter how wonderful or awful any given day is, some undisclosed future “today” will bring it all to a blessed end.  Death will finally find me.  And on that glorious day, I will finally see my Savior, Jesus, face-to-face.  That’s when, for all eternity, every tomorrow will not be like this day, but ever and always an even better day than the one before.  I can hardly wait!