Carpe Diem - A Song for Jason Devotional

This is the first devotional from the Highway to Heaven: SEASON TWO DVD release, written by freelance writer Mike Parker (BookPage, CCM, HomeLife, Lifeway.com, ChristianActivities.com), based on the inspirational episode “A Song for Jason” from television legend Michael Landon’s award-winning series, Highway to Heaven. A recipient of the Parent Television Council Seal of Approval, A&E Home Video released this highly collectible, six disc-set on DVD for the first time August 30. Available in the Christian Activities Music & Book Store, the set features all 24 episodes starring the legendary Michael Landon and Victor French, and includes high-profile guest stars such as Lorne Greene (Bonanza, Battlestar Galactica), Ed Asner (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), Eli Wallach (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and Shannen Doherty (Charmed, Beverly Hills 90210). More information on Highway to Heaven: SEASON TWO (and Season One) can be found at: www.newvideo.com.
Buy Highway to Heaven DVD’s on SALE at the Christian Activities Music & Book Store!
“Seize the day. Seize whatever you can, for life slips away just like hourglass sand. Seize the day. Pray for grace from God’s hand. Then nothing will stand in your way. Seize the day.”
– Singer/Songwriter, Carolyn Arends
Proverbs 27:1 – Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.
Matthew 6:34 – Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
There are few situations in life that are as heart wrenching as watching a child suffer with a debilitating disease. Almost worse than the disease is the inevitable – and unanswerable – question, ‘Why my child?’ As parents we would gladly take the suffering on ourselves, but that is not the way life works.
In the poignant and emotional two-part episode, “A Song for Jason,” Jonathan and Mark are assigned to the children’s cancer ward in a local hospital, where they encourage the children to attend a very special summer camp – a place where, for a time, they can forget their illness and remember what it is like to just be kids again.
Young Curtis, who is a cancer survivor, struggles to find the joy in life while his mother, fearful of losing her son, hovers protectively over him. She refuses to let him out of her sight, much less allowing him to go to camp for a week. It is Jonathan’s job to convince her to let the boy enjoy life while he still can.
“None of us knows what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Jonathan declares. “What’s important is how we live today.”
Wise words, indeed, for King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived once admonished us to not boast about tomorrow for we do not know what the day may bring. (Proverbs 27:1) The fact is, neither tomorrow nor yesterday exists, but only today. The only option we truly have is to live today. And that is a good thing! For what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
“To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort,” says essayist, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison.
“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them,” the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson concluded.
Carpe Diem! Seize the day! Yesterday is a memory and tomorrow may never be. “We cannot afford not to live in the present,” insists American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. “He is blessed over all mortals who looses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.”
“Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale,” British author Samuel Johnson observed, and Jesus Christ commanded His followers to “…not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
Albert Einstein, perhaps the world’s most revered scientist, declared that he never thought about the future for it would come soon enough. Instead he challenged his students and colleagues to “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.”
Carpe Diem! Seize the day! “Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow,” writes 19th Century Austrian author Franz Grillparzer. “I have to live for the day, and not worry about or try to know what tomorrow brings,” declared the Yugoslavian tennis star, Monica Seles. “If I’ve learned one thing from all that’s happened to me, it’s that if you would know what tomorrow brings, you may not want to live it.”
Triumph or tragedy, no one knows what tomorrow bring. Whether we are perfectly healthy or stricken with cancer, tomorrow – indeed, our next breath – is not promised to us. Today, this very moment, is the only time you have. In order to enjoy a good future you must waste none of your present, declared statistician and educator, Roger Babson.
Alfred D’Souza once lamented, “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
Let not a single moment pass without your notice. Live. Love. Laugh. Dance like no one’s watching. Seize the day! As the English poet Rudyard Kipling admonished, fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. If you can do that, the Earth is yours, and everything that’s in it.

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