I'm reminded of how fleeting life is. Especially after hearing about a dear friend's friend, a wife and mother, who died this weekend. And as I watch from across the ocean as a dear friend to our family is intensely battling terminal cancer. Sometimes it's too much. The morbid reality that we'll all die, sometime, somehow. That everyone we love and every person we interact with will also die.
I initially have the tendency to want to withdraw when I think about it, to give people less. I think it's mostly out of self-preservation, really. But then I also have the thought of wanting to give my life away more if it's so fleeting. To offer people more of myself, to love more deeply. The confrontation with death makes me scared to not live or love enough.
Several years ago after experiencing the deaths of friends, I became incredibly frustrated at the state of my life; that I couldn't manage to be alive enough. I couldn't experience things as fully as I wanted to, or enjoy something deeply enough, or purely love someone, or feel free from expectations from myself and others. I had the feeling of being trapped. I felt that death wasn't natural, and that a full life was somehow possible but I for some reason was incapable of having it. It's beautiful, though incredibly painful, that death causes us to consider the reality of our own lives. Are we really alive...fully?
There's of course a lot more I feel I could say. And as I continue to be confronted with death, I still have the experience of aching to fully live. But I have hope now. I have hope that the god i put my faith into has offered full life to me, that it's available. Now I just hope that in every interaction with someone, in every minute of my day I continue to choose life.
16 And I command you today: Love God, your God. Walk in his ways. Keep his commandments, regulations, and rules so that you will live, really live, live exuberantly, blessed by God, your God, in the land you are about to enter and possess.
17-18 But I warn you: If you have a change of heart, refuse to listen obediently, and willfully go off to serve and worship other gods, you will most certainly die. You won't last long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
19-20 I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you today: I place before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Choose life so that you and your children will live. And love God, your God, listening obediently to him, firmly embracing him. Oh yes, he is life itself, a long life settled on the soil that God, your God, promised to give your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
2 comments:
i remember right after my dad died. the separation I felt from "real" life. The distaste left for those who lived as if they would never die. And then i remember how intimately I experience the reality of eternity. That we are given 80 years here if that and it is just a drop in the bucket in comparison to eternity. I remember wishing to always experience the reality of death without the pain of it. I still wonder if that would ever be possible.
This is beautiful Laurie. I just love you.
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