Live Like We’re Dying

Well, someday we will get there.  The end of our days.  We will stare into a casket with our own name on it.  The sure and certain diagnosis.  Imagine…just two months before we got word from the doctor.  Death is coming.  What matters in those two months that has never mattered before?  What matters most?

Really think about it.  What rises to the top of your to-do list?  Would you keep working, just to have something to do?  Would you need to work to eat?  Would you be extravagant?  Would you savor moments with friends and family?  Could you?

Or would it inevitably be a series of factors outside our control?  Tying up loose ends with paper work.  Working because we don’t know our exact date of death?  Would it be a series of things we try but just can’t pull off?  After all, just because we know we are dying doesn’t mean we can suddenly do whatever we want. 

Or does it?  

Does knowing our date of death somehow snap us into some keen awareness of life?Does it finally cut through the red tape stuff most people have to stop for?  And if so, can we borrow that mindset now?

Imagine disregarding unnecessary distractions.  Needless pauses.  Instead having a holy sort of urgency, not for the unimportant, but for making what is most important happen.  [Warning: Doing this exercise WILL mess with your current outlook on life. ;-)] 

How can we get ourselves to that level of self-judgement now?  How do we actually get mad enough to live like we are dying?  

Think of this exercise: If you needed $5k for a loved one’s sudden life-or-death surgery,  would you find it?  If it depended on you, yes!  Somehow you would do it.  Because you have something important AND urgent enough.  Death, or a very real threat of it, gives us the necessary sense of urgency to focus enough on something to pull it off.  

Can we foster that mindset now?  Can we hasten the threat of death?  Or is the threat of death already real enough we don’t need to?  I don’t know how many breaths I have left, and the more I meditate on this the more the “threat” becomes real. 

“Lord, show me my life’s end and the number of my days…”

Doing easy is perpetually in our grasps.  Most of us have options to make life easier.   But we also have this nagging, aggravating pull to do something hard but important.  

Though we try to rationalize that the important is not that important, or that we are simply too busy to think about or deal with the impulse, the feeling remains.  

We know we have unused gifts, unmet desires for something good.  We know there is something inside us that has not yet been realized.  And we know, deep down, these gifts would truly serve others.  They would bring blessing to our communities.  

If we had the courage to pursue them.  

In this case, frankly, we need the urgency of our own mortality to hasten the use of these gifts.  We need it to shake off our excuses and actually get to the business of using them.  To experience again the liberating joy of their activation.   

For these gifts are given for the common good.  We can not know their power in isolation.  They are given for the community.  Of course we will need that community to understand them.

That’s how ironic (or stupid ;-) it is to feel selfish about pursuing our gifts.   

Sure there will be some casualties.  Sacred focus requires saying no (for people-pleasers so hard).  But if you really desire to put other’s first, eventually you will figure out that honing in on and using your gifts is the best way to get there.  

Sounds simple, it is not.  Our desire to please in other ways can easily shipwreck us. 

It’s a great ruse.  The lie is we must strangle our creative gifts to provide what our families and communities actually need.  It follows, then, that doing what we are called to do is selfish and playing it safe somehow seems heroic and sacrificial.

Obviously it is not ever that simple. These are complex matters. And yeah, sometimes we just to provide.  That’s obvious, and the muscle for that is already developed in most of us.  

But to sacrifice our creative calling for the sake of community or family, however noble it seems, may miss the point.  What then are we passing down after all?  What kind of life are we modeling?  What kind of life do we want the next generation to live?

Pass down what matters most…a life well lived in faith in the gifts that were freely given.  Not fear.  We have precious little time here. Death is coming sooner than later. Do it now!