WHAT IS YOUR LIFE?

By Shirley Wiggins

“What is your life?...” James 4:14

When your life isn’t looking anything like you wanted to end up with, what do you do?  Please don’t say, ‘Start over.’

I’ve done that – repeatedly; only to find that for all the self-help do-overs,  life never reached my expectations and I became an older version of the same old me. 

Until suddenly, I am decades older.

Life may slowly lose its appetite and all the things we used to love about it have a way of losing their flavor and appeal.

Life can become more about doing daily chores, marking months off the calendar instead of days.  The clock reveals that it is not your friend either, relentlessly subtracting time from you like a thief in the night.

Taking a ride to the hospital’s emergency room in an ambulance, while nitro pills dissolve under your tongue, forces you to face the very real possibility of the ultimate fate of human beings:  Death.

Suddenly the unlikely unthinkable begins to look like the almost certain reality of high possibility:  Death.

Dying

Ends

All

The

Hope

Death is either the end, or it opens the door to eternity.  Does death stop at the grave – the final destination?  Or, is it only a waypoint somewhere between dying and living again?

We who are breathing know that the period between birth and death is called simply “Life.”   We can live without thinking much about it – Breathe in, breathe out…live life:  time passes without effort. 

The calendar eliminates years, the clock subtracts hours as it ticks the moments away, day unto night and night unto day.

But, dying?  That’s another matter entirely.  Who thinks about it?  And, why think about it since none of us know the certain date of our death.

We may know the date of our birth,  and the longer we live, the better we know that only a short “dash” separates the two dates from birth to death.

As the ambulance lights flash and sirens wail, EMT’s calmly perform their duties:  one drives, the other assists the patient.

On my second ambulance ride, I hear this:  ‘Transporting a seventy-year-old woman; heart problems.”

Seventy years old!  Heart attack?!

I must admit that hearing this thing spoken out loud raised up quite a bit of angst in me, and I prayed fervently for peace.   While I knew I was experiencing a heart emergency, I found it amazing too that I was actually 70 years old.   Not that I don’t  know and realize my true age, I just do not feel that  I have lived long enough to be that age! 

Do we humans realize the brevity of life?

Seventy years or seventeen years, all pass too quickly for words as most of us will  realize when we stand at the conscious realization that death waits for all who now breathe.  Every living person has a divine appointment with the day of our own death.

Other truths have become conscious realizations for me in the month since the second stent was implanted in my heart.

There is so much more that I want to learn about life – and about death.  Both are realities:  the reality of life and the certainty of death.  Life is about living the life that God has planned and willed and provided for each one who will receive it as He has granted it “by His divine power.”  (See 2 Peter 1:3-4.)

One thing is becoming clearer to me:  being prepared to die is not the same as being ready to die.

May I encourage you to think about some seriously significant things as they pertain to life ----- whoever you are and wherever you are,  death steadily approaches coming closer to each one of us day by day.  Consider that just as life comes inherent with responsibilities, so does death by its very finality in this significant way:  you have made your last choice when you draw in your final breath of life on this earth.

No matter what awaits us upon our death, it is our choices made in life that determines our destination in death.

Until we become adults, our choices are made for us by parents and/or guardians.  Then we become both responsible and liable for the individual choices we make.

Choices matter.  What you believe matters because it influences the choices you make.  What you choose every day matters. 

So, I ask again, what is your life?  What do you want your life to be?  What do you wish you could do, or wish you had done?

Assess what you know (believe) about life and about death.    Remember that what you think you know must be based in truth, and not in wishful, hopeful thinking.

Lies deceive and will one day be eradicated.  Truth informs and saves and will never change or pass away. 

Seek to know truth.

Truth matters.  Truth lives eternally.  It is what we do with Truth that determines our destiny.

For me personally, I know the God of the Bible is the God of life, and of death.

The human spirit will return to God when life is extinguished in the body on this earth.  The soul of the human who chose to believe in God through Jesus Christ will return to God and abide in the place prepared in heaven for all eternity.

The soul of the human who rejected God while living in the body on this earth will enter eternity in the place prepared for Satan and his demons.

The  name of each person is entered into God’s Book of Life when we choose to receive Jesus Christ as God’s plan for our own salvation.  Those whose names are not written there when they die have no other chance to choose.

Death is the doorway into eternal life either in heaven or in hell.  No human was meant to go into hell, but human choices determine human destiny.  (See Revelation 20:11-15.)

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life?  For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.  Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. ‘ As it is you boast in your ignorance.  All such boasting is evil.  So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him (her) it is sin.”  James 4:13-17. (Emphasis mine.)

“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.”  Proverbs 27:1.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who according to Hs abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be  revealed in  the last time.”  1 Peter 1:3-5.