Proverbs 16:9 The human mind plans the way, but the LORD directs the steps. 

 

I was a hospice chaplain. My job was to be with dying people. That may give some of you the creeps but I gotta tell you it was an amazing job. Death is immutable. When we realize that we are going to die we notice, we really see life. 

 

During my time as a chaplain I talked to lots of nurses and people on their deathbeds. I remember this one guy. When I first started visiting him his room was all closed off. No light coming in from the windows, he would stay in bed (which wasn’t necessary for him). He had a machine that condescended the oxygen for him because, after a life of smoking, he couldn’t breathe. I visited every week, and near the end sometimes multiple times a week. I made a point of opening the curtains in his room when I arrived. I let the sun in and on nice days opened the window. We had gotten to a point in our relationship where I can say we had a real relationship. Death helped that. It sped things up. There was no need to put on niceties and fain proper decorum. I wanted a breath of fresh air because his apartment smelled of smoke, so I opened a window. He wanted truth, so we talked. 

 

The truth was that he spent his whole life seeking himself. Seeking his well being, comfort, joy, happiness, ease, and a lifestyle that would garner envy from the few people around him. He left his wife years ago. He had only one son who, like his father, chased the dreams of this world. That rat race led him from one city to the next, nowhere near his dying father. 

 

The world’s truth is that he won. He had all kinds of money. I’m sure he lived in the best part of town. He had several cars, and I heard about all his vacations and travels. But you know what, and here's the thing, I was the only one who visited him. The guy is dying and no one cares. The nurses care. I cared. But we just met the guy. No one was in his life because he never shared his life. 

 

To live the fullest life you have to decide what you will be burdened by? What will you give up so that you can have the other thing?

 

Go read Proverbs 16, the whole thing, really. It drives home the point I’m trying to make: A life in Christ means you can‘t have everything. You will have to decide to make sacrifices. For Christ that was His life, thanks be to God, He mounted a cross and took the ultimate burden. For you and me that means, maybe fighting traffic. My wife tells me all the time of the frustration of getting to Wednesday’s Ablaze with our middle schoolers schedule and Charlotte traffic. We do that because our Christ community is valuable. Here is where we find friends for our kids, so that they can be surrounded by others with similar values. Here is where we find friends because a life in Christ does not happen alone. Here are the relationships that will define, truly, what is best in life. 

 

I ended up doing that guy's funeral. It was me, the son, his girlfriend and some people who work at the funeral home. I can’t remember what I said because there was nothing to say, and he told me as much. He told me that for all his fun it got him nothing. A painful death that came too soon. No relationships that had meaning. Dying alone. The thing is he was not unique. Many others, who did have spouses or children, had no friends. Had no relationships outside of their immediate family. They thought they knew what good was. They thought our culture was telling them the truth about how to live the best life. They were all wrong. It's too bad it took their deathbeds to help them see it.

 

A life in Christ means you can’t have everything but what you get is CHRIST, and life!