I am a little amazed at the amount of people around me that have contracted dreaded diseases. Perhaps it is because I am now a little older and the people I know are older still. Every day, my wife and I seem to hear of more people with cancers, strokes, heart attacks, mystery fits, and worst of all halitosis. All except the last are as serious as they can get. For the victims, this is an attack on their life that they need to defend or else surrender is the end.
I would hate to go through the experience that all of those people must have gone through when the doctor sits them down and says that he has bad news. I expect that they each would have had to work through their own grief cycle; rejection, anger, despair, and finally acceptance. Then if they were lucky, they would have time to get their attitude right so that they could fight this attack with the best possible mental strategy. And then hope and pray that this too will pass.
It just highlights the fact that death is always around the corner. Can it be that those who have to accept they have a dreaded disease are luckier still than those whose lives are ended instantly by a bullet or a car? At least they have some time to prepare. Although these same people might vehemently disagree!
As a Christian, I am supposed to be ready for the day when death knocks. Supposedly I have lived my life as a servant of others and with my values intact. I have a relationship with God and a firm belief in an everlasting life with him when I die.
Yet am I ready? Certainly not!
Am I not ready because I jealously guard this life of mine, or because I know that I have not been the person I have been called to be, or is it because my faith is rather weak? I’m not sure, perhaps all of the above. A regular recurring thought of mine is that I need to do something about it, because try as I might, my time will come when there is no more time to do anything about it.
There are things that I can do like studying my faith, working on my relationship with God, striving to be a force of goodness, living with love, and praying more. Of course all of this should be driven by my outward expression of love for my fellow man rather than the threat of death!
It is a little hard, but then again, I guess it would be harder still, to go unprepared...
1 comment:
I'm not at all afraid to die, but like you I don't think I'm ready for it at all. I do hope that I can try and do more of what He wants me to do before I die.
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