This is your life – If your life is something that interests you
“Then one day you find,
ten years have passed.
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun.”
pink floyd, Weather
OLD AGE is a benefit in the sense that a lifetime can be seen for what it has been. But the downside is that people on their deathbeds often mourn a life they feel wasted or, worse, was a source of harm to others. Why at the end of life do we see what we should have seen so clearly all along? It is because our death surrounds us and we are suddenly ready to surrender to it. There is no more benefit in ignoring the inevitable. The inevitable comes, and lurks, taking no prisoners.
We are standing, sitting or lying down in this day, our very moment, and we are beset by many forces that keep us where we are. But at any given moment we may challenge one or more of these forces; some of these forces we won’t know what to challenge, but some of us are fools not to.
We want to challenge those forces of addiction and habitual patterns that we find difficult to escape. We have a great reason for overriding their control over us: we don’t want to have on our heads and on our shoulders the sorrow of facing each other in those final days.
So what about sudden death? There is no opportunity for repentance available. The next thing we can know is the fact of Judgment, as we are brought to face God in some ethereal way.
This is your Life. This is my life. We live in this time because God commanded us to live and leave our mark on humanity and life in this here and now.
Without creating unnecessary urgency, this day calls, because both death and the afterlife call, and let’s not miss it, they call eternally in their immediacy. None of us can overcome physical death as Jesus did, but we can take seriously the promise of the end of physical life and, with it, make the most of it.
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This is your Life. This is my life. But when life takes on a post-mortem perspective, we begin to understand how truly important our actions are in the body. From the day we die we can visit, look back and decide where our life is headed now.
© 2014 SJ Wickham.
