Life Slipping By

Mont. St. Michel, France

I know when I am going to die.

All I have to do is go to deathclock.com and enter my day of birth and BMI and a few other things and it gives me the day of my death and starts ticking down the seconds. It says I am going to die on October 23, 2042. That date seems a bit too close to today's date, so I go back and choose the "optimistic" setting. That setting gives me an extra 24 years. My new day of death is November 14, 2066. I am sticking with "optimistic".

Either way, the truth is I am going to die someday. It could be soon, or it could be many years before my deathclock.com seconds run out. No matter what, my journey on this earth will be very brief. I don't mean to be flippant about something that should be taken seriously. I would take it seriously if I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Its just that since I am in good health, I sometimes forget that my days are numbered. I get caught up in the trials and to do lists and forget that I have a finite number of seconds to spend here. Seconds to live, like pennies in my pocket, how am I going to spend them? Unlike pennies, putting seconds in the bank is not an option. I can spend my seconds deliberately, or I can let them disappear into the air unheeded, but either way, they are lost to me forever. So, how can I spend my seconds wisely?

If I thought that I was born by chance and would die on a day randomly determined by my blood pressure readings and driving habits, I would live differently. I would work my way through a list of eat-drink-and-be-merry-nesses. However, if I believe that Someone put me on this earth and He will take me back out of it, that changes everything. "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind and with all of your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."

Those are my instructions.

Love.

Simple instructions, yet not so simple. It seems like "all" should be easy to measure and loving should be easy to do, but sometimes it isn't, and constantly I fail. So, the question presses, how do I spend this second, and the next one, and the next one so that when I am down to the last handful of them I can say with the apostle Paul, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith"?