Finding Life

I’ve always been in love with October and its signature shedding of Jacaranda trees. Time has really flown,I feel like God has His finger pressed on the forward button of time. So much has happened; a cocktail of blessings, lessons, mistakes, new beginnings and more lessons and it’s been quite a while since I wrote here. I would love to unpack the last couple of months in neat summarized paragraphs for you to read but instead I will tell you about the now and why I have decided to write, it has a lot to do with life, God and a rebirth of some sorts.

Somewhere between the last time I wrote and now, my view of life changed. It wasn’t just a day’s event but a series of things and today I will share one of those things. A couple of months ago on my way home, I walked past a carpenter. He was making a wooden coffin. As I observed him drive in screws through the holes to attach them to the coffin, I thought about life and death all at once. I hate thinking about death and the finality of things but many times death teaches us a lot about life and that day it was as if God had stopped me by the road and given me refresher lessons on life and what really matters.

There was something profound in that small passing moment, the realization that in that coffin there was space only reserved for a lifeless body, nothing else. This small insight is something I’ve been learning from life, at the end of our different journeys, the sum of our lives will be more than the tangible things; the wealth we accumulated, houses we built or titles we carried. All these things are great but we will not squeeze our houses or cars inside that little box instead what will matter is the intangible; the things that don’t expire, like how we lived our lives, how we loved, the lives we changed, hearts we touched, hands we held, tears we wiped, the shoulder we gave. That’s what life is about; investing in people and the relationships we build.

I have found a new passion for life, for this very day and for every breathe I take. I used to be anxious about death; about the when? How? Would my purpose be fulfilled? I no longer worry about these questions; instead I try to spend every day answering the now, how and here. What does God want to me to do now? How can I make my life count where I am? How can I invest in someone else’s life?

Life is short, whether we live to be 40 or 100 doesn’t really matter, what matters is how we make those years count. Wake up in the morning and sandwich as much love, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and God’s goodness into the 24hours God has blessed you with, make them the best 1440 minutes of your life, so one day when the journey is over, you will look back to a life well lived.

"I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well"~ Diane Ackerman.