The Road of Life

Been thinking a lot about life lately… and death.

It’s all around us.  People living and people dying.   We are told to “live like there is no tomorrow.”  Yet, we all live as we are promised another day.

We are not promised anything.  That’s the truth.  But we live arrogant lives and continue through our medial days.

I would gladly give my life to save another’s.  Sometimes I think I should have continued focusing on going into the armed forces.  At least then, I could say I died for something.  No, now I am a salesman and I wonder where the meaning in MY life is.

I really haven’t been the best example of a follower of Christ.  I say that not in the sense that I am drunk on the roof with my pants down, but I really don’t talk much to others about Jesus.

I spoke a few months ago about a stripper that I dated.  She told me the news and I really never gave her second thought or a follow up call after our second date. 

I got the news, yesterday, that she just learned she had cervical cancer.  Here is a young woman who is faced with a life threatening disease and I never once brought up the topic of Jesus.

I felt ashamed yesterday.  Felt like I had let Him down… that I let her down. 

I judged her the same way I had always been judged and passed her down the social ladder as everyone else has probably done.

I am talking to a new girl now.  We talk all the time and pretty much had the same past history of broken hearts.  I like her.  I enjoy talking to her.  There is only one thing about her that I don’t like.  One thing that would prevent me from ever asking her out. 

Then I start to wonder.  “Does she know Jesus?”  Maybe she has heard the same stories and rituals I had heard my whole life the kept me away from a relationship from Him and she doesn’t know that there is a better way to live.

Maybe I shouldn’t pass judgment on her so fast, as I have been tempted to do before.  I am not saying that I have to be in a relationship with her, just be a friend. 

My life, as meaningless as I think it is, maybe I can find meaning in the little things.  If nothing else, the people I meet on a daily basis inspire me to be better than the rest around me.

Like Bruce, who taught me that there is a thing as true love.   Or Frank, who quit his corporate job to start a non-profit foundation for Parkinson’s disease.  There was Linda who, though she was 60, found a meaning to keep living after finding her husband with another woman.

These people remind me that life is what you make of it.  It is your story to write.  I was tired of the life being sucked out of me at the hotel, so I quit, to go do what I do now.  I can honestly say that I have never been this relaxed.

Then I think of the girl with cancer, who I never talked a bit about Jesus too.  We take Jesus for granted, thinking that others will do the job we were instructed to do.  We think that “oh, someone else will tell them” or “who doesn’t know about Jesus?”

Maybe they do know of Him, but they don’t know Him like you do.  Why else would they not be living for Him like you and me? 

It’s fitting, I am writing about life while the movie The Green Mile, a movie about death, plays in the background for the second time.

We forget that sometimes that this road of life we are in, is headed in one direction.  You can’t make it go anywhere else.  The only thing you can change is the way you get there.

I end with this:

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting,

 for death is the destiny of every man;

the living should take this to heart.

Ecclesiastes 7.2