Eruantale

Aug1 Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

There will be eighteen candles on my cake this year. Eighteen. I can’t stop musing on that thought. True, it’s not really that old, though it’s old for me. But, assuming I live to be eighty, in just a few short years I’ll have lived out a full quarter of my life. I can certainly rejoice that I have eternal life in Jesus Christ, but I’m realizing that my days here are very short. I wonder how many of my peers have that awareness.

It seems to me that most don’t, or at least they don’t act as though they do. We’re short-sighted. We don’t generally look at an elderly person and think, “Some day I’ll be old.” Rather, we look at an elderly person and send a text message to our friend, “ZOMG dat laD iz old!” We don’t look at an anti-smoking ad and think, “Hmm, I better quit smoking or I’m going to get lung cancer.” We live as though we’re immortal, invincible beings with a future of infinite tomorrows and boundless opportunities ahead of us. But that idea is so far from the truth. Indeed, we seem to be in denial.

I suppose many people have no hope for any sort of afterlife, so they just want to enjoy themselves while they’re here, and maybe go out with a bang. They want to live life to the fullest, a concept which, in general, isn’t a bad thing. But we have some interesting ideas about what that means. We have a big list:

• follow your heart
• do what will make you happy
• see these 1,000 places before you die
• become a millionaire
• meet Orlando Bloom
• go to college
• have a big career
• backpack in Europe
• eventually get married, or at least move in with your boyfriend

There’s a lot of meaningless junk in that list; “follow your heart” in particular is a rather silly idea. Most of the things listed are pretty selfish as well. Then again, the whole concept of living my life to the fullest for the sake of me is selfish. Would everything on that list really make me happy? Absolutely not. Would any of it make a big difference when I die? Probably not.

Actually, it would.

“Come now, Shawna! How could my meeting Orlando Bloom make a difference when I die—unless, of course, we got married and had ten children?”

The act itself certainly wouldn’t seem to matter very much. Instead, it’s the value we place on certain things that will make a difference. For instance, let’s take the example of meeting Orlando Bloom: if celebrity gossip, meeting a celebrity or celebrities in general is my primary focus in life (i.e. takes up most of my time and interest) it will show in everything I do and say. And everything I do and say will affect the people around me. And the people around me will affect the people around them. And it goes on, and on, and on.

Here’s another example: Let’s say my philosophy in life is to follow my heart. Down the road, my heart tells me that I love a man who’s married with kids. But I follow it anyway. The wife finds out. They divorce. She remarries, and so does he. The kids now shuffle back and forth between two homes, two families. Already I’ve made a huge difference, and their kids aren’t even in high school yet. Who knows what’s yet to come?

Suppose instead that I just like to do things I enjoy; things that make me feel good. I whittle my time away playing video games, watching videos on YouTube, and “checking my MySpace”. That’s all innocent enough. But what else could I have done with my time? As a teenager, I probably couldn’t have spent it curing cancer. But I could’ve been reading a book. Perhaps one of those books would inspire me to write my own great book, or take an interest in politics and someday become the President of the United States.

Or maybe the things that make me feel good are somewhat less innocent. Maybe I spend my evenings at parties getting drunk, getting high, having sex, or all of the above. It’s possible nothing undeniably horrible will come out of my hobbies, but then again, it’s also possible I may decide to drive drunk and end up killing three people. I may accidentally overdose or mix the wrong kind of drugs. Maybe I’ll get infected with AIDS and unknowingly give it to the person I love, or tonight’s one night stand. No matter what, it makes a difference.

Different kinds of differences

Everything we do makes a difference, not only when we die, but now. We can’t get around that fact. We can, however, decide what kind of difference to make. It makes a difference whether I decide to stay at home and hang out with friends or volunteer at the homeless shelter; whether I decide to become a missionary or pursue celebrity; whether I belittle people around me or encourage them; whether I live my life for me or for God—or for some kind of ‘higher calling’ if you’re an atheist or agnostic, or what-have-you.

I’m almost eighteen. In less than three years I will have lived out one fourth of my life, assuming I don’t die prematurely. It’s possible I may die in a car accident when I’m twenty-five. It’s possible I may die in a car accident today. What kind of difference will I have made? A big one or a small one? A good one or a bad one? What will people say?

• “He was an awesome Halo player!”
• “She sure was great at movie trivia!”
• “She was a [insert less-than-polite word for an unfriendly woman].”
• “He had twenty-six MILLION friends on MySpace!”
• “Her research saved thousands of lives.”
• “She dedicated her life to helping others.”
• “He wrote the greatest novel of the century.”

Or maybe… “She yelled at me for using tables to build my website! And then she said Internet Explorer is a piece of junk! Man, that girl was weird.”

Tick tock.

This post is 1038 words long and is part of ERULYNSKY Blogathon 3000
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Birthday cake photo copyright © MissCGlass. Clock photo copyright © Patwise.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 9:37 am in General, Personal. You can subscribe to the comment feed to follow replies or leave a trackback from your own site.