A Thief in the Night

Today I attended the wake for my next door neighbor. He came home from work on Thursday, told his wife he wasn't feeling well, laid down on the couch and died. His twenty-year-old daughter frantically performed CPR, but there was nothing that could be done. He was only fifty-three years old.  He was an organ donor and his death helped four other people live. This offers some consolation to his family, but they are still in a terrible state of shock.

We humans all live with the reality that we will die. We do not know the day or the hour. Many have mused about what they would do if they knew that it was their last day, but the truth is, most of us will not know. The obituary page of the newspaper is filled with people who woke up in the morning with no idea that they would meet God that day.

We cannot live under a cloud of fear that death is looming around every corner, but we do need to always be ready. My neighbor had no opportunity to say goodbye to his family, but he was a kind and generous man and his love for them was evident every day. They have no need to wonder if he cared about them. We need to live lives filled with love and kindness - every day.

We also need to always be ready to meet God. It is easy to put off care of our spiritual lives, thinking we have plenty of time to get our spiritual house in order, to repent of our sins and make amends. The reality may be very different. Today is the day to make sure we are in a state of grace, and then we need to make sure we stay there. We need to put God first in our lives. What we do here on earth is important, but it is only a blink of an eye compared to the eternity that awaits. Make sure you are living in such a way that if that eternity began today, you'd be at peace.