What Really Matters

I’m at The Glorious Table today talking about what it really means to live like it might be the last day of your life. Join me?

There’s a song by Jason Gray that goes,

I wanna live like there’s no tomorrow
Love like I’m on borrowed time
It’s good to be alive, yeah

The first line of the chorus, above, reminds me of the old cliche that says almost exactly the same thing: we ought to live like it’s our last day on earth. The impossibility of this has weighed heavily on me for the past month, ever since I first heard my doctor say the word cancer. I don’t have cancer, but for several weeks I had to live with the possibility that I did. And frankly, I found that the possibility was more than enough to make me ponder how I really do live.

Do I live like every day might be my last day? Goodness, but that seems morose, even morbid. It also seems like it might inspire selfishness or recklessness. If it truly was my last day, what could I possibly do differently? Would I forego the dishes and the laundry and the diapers? Would I jump on a plane and fly someplace exotic? Would I indulge some kind of bucket list dream and go skydiving or the like? The truth is, I can’t live like every day might be my last day if it means these things. Nor do I want to. I don’t want to wake up in the morning and think, “What if this is the last day of my life?” and let that question be the driving force behind my waking hours. So as well-intentioned as that old saying might be, I’ll take a pass.

On the other hand, I can identify with the second line of the song’s chorus, Love like I’m on borrowed time. As a Christian, this resonates with me. If we believe that Jesus will return someday, that we have a limited amount of time to make a maximum impact for Christ, to share his love and his sacrifice with as many people as we can in order to help him win souls for eternity, then I suppose we ought to love–and live–like we’re on borrowed time.

But there’s more to it than that for me too, now that I’ve faced down the c-word. It’s not about living like there’s a ticking alarm clock in your pocket, but about living aware. Some people who undergo a battery of scans and tests and long days and weeks of waiting to find out whether or not they have cancer probably want to move on as fast as they can and forget it ever happened. Not me. And I’ll be honest with you–it surprises me that I feel this way. But while I do want to forget the fear and the panic and the preemptive grief that assailed me in those days, what I don’t want to forget is the immediacy. The in-the-moment-ness of it. Time slowed down somehow, and every second was rife with awareness.

To read the rest of the post, click here to join me over at The Glorious Table.