What if you knew just how your life could be?

A little over nine months from now we’ll all be commemorating 9/11.  The way I figure it, experiencing that day as a 34-year-old, I’ll be 84 at the time of the 50th anniversary.

So many people lost their lives, and so many people’s lives were changed, but just as much, lives are changing now, right now, and so many more are dying each day.

What if you knew just how your life could be?  Those final moments approaching when you’d never see him or her who’s special or dearly beloved again.  It’s not only death that comes like a thief in the night.  So much loss occurs with the suddenness of a sliding door.

Yet, we so easily commit our lives to wasteful things, like scrolling endlessly with an empty gaze searching for whatever we don’t want to miss out on — all the while our children are living and breathing right before us even as if they are not there.

We go out of our way to devote many minutes at a time to curating messages in cyberspace, or to commenting on banal things, all the while real life screams past us at a terrifying and regretful rate in full view of hindsight.

I stand at the lectern at funerals and see it all before me.  I shudder to think the regrets I’ll have later in life when I consider the people I so willingly serve ‘for God’ all the while neglecting my own family.  Perhaps some of them understand, but not all.

My work is a labour of love and it’s such an honour to serve God, but the potential cost of it’s not lost on me.  And it’s something I’m wrestling with.  Where am I failing in terms of time and effort in the lives closest to me?

But life is tinged with regret, and surely the wisdom of it is to know in the moment, and to decide to turn it around while we can.

The true priorities of life are best considered in the light of death—when life changes in an instant through actual death or death to dreams or relationships or situations where loss trudges in as an uninvited guest that insists on staying.

At the beginning of a New Year, some are given to resolutions, and I’ve certainly tried a few.  Perhaps the better resolve is to come back to the basics and find out what God’s will for the actual moment is.  I know it’s not shackled to social media, which is becoming subtly more and more anti-social by the day.

Call me a prophet and throw tomatoes at me if you wish, it’s just that these things seem important to say, so here I am saying them.

May your year be blessed.

Photo by Kyle Hinkson on Unsplash