Life is Short (but this post is not :))

I haven’t gone to see my dad’s grave yet since the funeral last year, but my mom has on occasion and she told me that right next to my dad’s headstone is hers – they purchased both ahead of time after he’d gotten cancer just to get that expense out of the way. Hers has her name on it and her birth year followed by a blank space, as if someone or something is just waiting for her to die. Or for any of us to die for that matter; it reminds me of one of my favorite worship songs “We are a moment, you are forever. Lord of the ages, God before time.” And it makes me stop and wonder what I’m filling my earthly life with. Playing computer games? Complaining about the weather, about my job, about where we’re going to live? Do any of those things really matter?

It’s kind of cool when you can get just a glimpse of how meaningless so many things on earth really are. For example, I saw an episode of Oprah a long time ago now, and on it was a young woman who had been hit by a drunk driver and left to burn alive in her car. Fortunately, she was rescued just in time, but her face was so disfigured with burns that you wondered how she could see, hear, and talk. It truly didn’t look like a face at all, and it brought tears to my eyes just looking at her. But she said that she only allowed herself to complain (or regret, worry, cry, dwell on her circumstances) for 5 minutes a day. Five stinkin’ minutes?! I have a tremendously blessed life and I complain more than that about any given thing in the course of an hour, even if only in my head. This episode made me cry as I thought about the meaningless things I worry or complain about and spend time on. Appearances, for example. This lady will never be looked at as “normal” again and she had no bad thing to say even to the person who left her to burn in her car. It brought tears to my eyes, and I silently vowed to be less self-focused, less materialistic, less ungrateful.

But why is it that those glimpses of the way things should be, of true gratitude, are just that – glimpses? Why can’t those types of convictions last to the point that we actually change the way we think and live permanently? I think about my dad, and if I live to be the same age as him, then my life is almost half over. What do I want to fill the 2nd half of my life with? Petty worries, complaints, and attempts to make myself feel and look better? How hard is it to put others first, to put life into perspective and see how short it is, and how little time we have to be the person God wants us to be? I know these are deep thoughts for a Monday morning, but I’m currently unemployed and have been thinking about what I’m doing with all my free time. I’m not so sure it’s what God would want me to be doing. Not that I’m committing some terrible sin, but somewhere He said, “If you’re not for me, you’re against me.” Is my complaining, worrying, judging others in my mind, and wasting time in front of the television FOR God? (Answer: Um, no.)