You Could Die Today

Interesting post title huh? It is actually similar to a chapter title in Francis Chan's book, Crazy Love. The title; You Might Not Finish This Chapter. Of course by the title you can guess the chapter discusses our fragility as humans and how brief the time is we actually spend on this planet. He points to a scripture verse in James that reminds us how short our life is - much like a mist, a morning fog, cold breath, or the steam that rises from a pot of boiling water. Here and gone all within a brief moment! Francis sets up his chapter with a quote by Fredrick Buechner?

"Intellectually we all know that we will die, but we do not know it in a sense that the knowledge becomes apart of us. We do not know it in the sense of living as though it is true. On the contrary, we tend to live as though our lives would go on forever."

I shook my head at after reading this. We all KNOW that one day we could die, BUT we see that day as sometime later, YEARS maybe DECADES from now. The truth is that it could be by the time you finish this sentence. You could finish this post, go to bed and not open your eyes to see the next morning. This could very easily be my last post. Depressing? Morbid? Pessimistic? Maybe. But also very true. We tend to push this back in the recess of our mind. I do.

But really what would my life look like if I kept this truth before me every day, allow it to become apart of me. There are a lot of things I would change, do different, stop doing, keep doing, and do more. So what keeps me from making those changes now. What keeps you from making those changes now.

I believe it is fear and comfort. When death creeps into our life, whether through a loved one or news of our own expiration date, we are faced with our greatest fear. Ceasing to exist as we have known. What else is there to fear now. Nothing. That fear has to be faced and eventually looses it's power. Death takes us out of your comfort zone. Emotions, thoughts, challenges, and events that were kept at bay because of our comfort rush in and force us to take notice. And when you think about people who achieve great things, or use their lives to make a difference in their world. They do two things; get outside their comfort zone and face their fear. We are afraid and we are comfortable - we are comfortably afraid. That is what keeps us from growing and keeps us from doing what we often feel we should do. I'm tired of being comfortable, but afraid of what it takes to move out of that.