9/11 Prayer atop the Rogue Valley Manor in Oregon

Statistic on death: 100% of people die, including you, and including me.

At a recent retirement ceremony, my wife Kathy shared a list of annoyances with the crowd gathered there. They’re things she never knew she’d have to contend with as the wife of a firefighter:

1) At the movies, when there’s a car explosion, he will lean over and say, “That would never really happen.”

2) When asked to go for a “drive” with him, he starts scouting fire access to homes or does street familiarization.

3) After a hard shift, the words, “Let’s take a nap,” really do mean a nap.

4) Certain tones on appliance timers can get him awake and out of bed in 3 seconds flat.

5) You can come home to find he has set up a multi-casualty incident scene with your kid’s matchbox cars.

6) Terms of endearment on a text are “ETA” and “Copy.”

That was a few days ago. Today I spoke with a woman who recently lost her husband of 30 years. With tears welling up in her eyes, she told me how the little things that irritated her about her husband didn’t matter anymore. She said she’d give anything to have him back, along with those little quirks that seemed so annoying before he died.

Two men I know have little time left to live. They’re both dying of cancer. Amazingly, they both told me, if they could somehow go back in time and erase their cancer, they wouldn’t do it.

They said, before their cancer they feel they wasted most of their time on things that aren’t important. Making money, mainly. But now their focus is on anything and everything that has eternal value. Loving God and loving people, mainly.

They’re not wasting their lives any longer. They’re focused on Jesus Christ, and bearing fruit for Him — at work, in their family, with their friends, everywhere they go. (John 15:4)

We’re all going to die.

Everyone of us.

Relative to eternity, we all have very little time to live.

So live for Christ.

Give your time to Him.

Give yourself to Him.