Why you must do what gives you joy

Three years ago Mike Meadows, 47, had a game-changing heart attack that resulted in open-heart surgery and six by-passes. May 2, 2016, on his fiftieth birthday, Mike wrote the following on his Facebook page. (You can read more about the details of his cardiac wakeup call at the end of the blog.)

Mike at work on his 50th birthday.

“I want to say a big thank you to everyone for the warm birthday wishes for big 5-0. Not to get too philosophical on you, but I promised myself something almost three years ago after heart surgery and this birthday was just cause to renew that promise.

” With the realization that I have more years behind me than in front of me, that promise was to spend more time doing those things I love without having a detailed plan in place. Not that there’s anything wrong with goals, mind you. But far too often in the past I’ve said, “One of these days I want to….” or “I wish I could do this but…” and then find some excuse for not doing it. I always wanted to see down the road and see where things were going before stepping out just doing it.

“That all changed with that promise. That’s why I’m on the Humane Society board. That’s why I continue with photography—canines, weddings (This year will be my busiest year.), families, seniors, and so forth. And that’s why I finally started playing the piano for college music students again. I’ve been trying to get on the roster of accompanists for the last couple of years, and I finally got on board for the fall semester of 2015 and continued this past spring semester and hope to return again in the fall. It’s certainly been a breath of fresh air and a stress reliever for sure.

“So it was very fitting that on my birthday, I had the opportunity to play for a young lady’s cello recital on my birthday. It’s been a real privilege to work with some really talented young people and awesome instructors these past couple of semesters. I am very glad to be playing again at this level and in this capacity.

“I have a quote on my computer at work that says, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” And that’s pretty much the way I’m approaching life right now. Life’s too short to put off the things that bring us joy while we keep ourselves busy with “life.” Where will it lead? Who knows? But you’ll never know until you start.”

 What gives you joy?

Mike has discovered a wonderfully freeing truth, and I applaud him for recognizing it and doing something about it. That moment of recognition he experienced, and the resultant promise he made himself, reminds me of a marvelous poem I read years ago.

 I lost my soul today

For the sake of cleaning and computers and junk.

It was a wonder-day of beauty.

Rapturous leaves afire in the sun entreated me;

Butterflies beckoned, birds entreated with song;

The great sky, wide and blue as the ocean,

Implored me to drift on the miracle tide

Of gladness and renewing.

But I turned away.

There were chairs to be dusted, floors to be vacuumed…

Floors, mind you! Common carpet and dirt

That must absorb my being.

And the ecstatic world without

Pleaded with me in vain.

A book lay open on the table.

In it were hidden jewel-truths

More wonderful than gems in the depths of the earth.

”Gather us! Take us! Be comforted and inspired!”…

But there were keys to strike on a computer,

Documents to be typed and files to be sorted;

Papers, mind you, which must absorb my soul!

A Master Musician there was—

I might have heard Him had I paused to think it

This golden afternoon, the music of angels….

But there was junk in the garage that must be cleared away—

Junk, mind you! Stacking newspapers, sorting recycling, and categorizing things for my garage sale

That must smother my soul.

And the Great Musician played, unheeded.

Had I moved a few steps, I might have listened;

Had I gone a few paces from the cluttered path….

But I lost my soul today,

For cleaning, computers, and junk.

There will be many days when I may organize and type and clean.

I traded Beauty for an hour of cleaning

I sold my birthright to meet one more deadline.

O Beauty, stand once more upon my threshold!

O Day of Wonder, beckon me again!

That I, the penitent, may open wide my dwelling

And plead with Loveliness as she has pled with me.

—adapted from a poem by Angela Morgan

The first time I heard mental health connected with things that give us joy was in 1999 when I agonized about my career and read the book, What Color is Your Parachute? [1] The purpose of this book is to help you find a career you love. One of the most memorable exercises for me was to think back through your life and remember the times you were happiest. What were you doing at those times? What brought you the most fulfillment? In what activities were you most likely to lose track of time? Those are the things that give you joy.

Following the path of joy means I must stop doing those things that frustrate me and emotionally bankrupt me. I now leave committee and board work to others. I am very selective in my viewing habits, including Facebook, and am good friends with the “off” button. Violence, blatant sin, and rude disrespect drain my soul and I no longer tolerate them. The things I love that make the day worthwhile are being with my wife, observing nature, gardening and bird-watching, playing the piano, writing, and something new: coloring.

What about you?

 

Epilogue: The rest of Mike’s story

It all started on the day after Thanksgiving, 2012. Yes, Black Friday has new meaning to me. I was working at my computer one minute, and the next I found myself kneeling in the floor, clutching my chest in severe pain with all the classic symptoms of a heart attack. I sent my son across the street to my in-laws for aspirin, chewed a couple of them, and then got to the hospital. Within an hour or two I found myself looking out the window of a helicopter on my way to Indy.

After a heart catheterization to determine where the blockages were and to what extent they blocked blood flow, it was determined that I had a multitude of blockages but specialists weren’t in agreement regarding my readiness for surgery. Apparently, if you do surgery too early in the process, the grafts don’t mature. The diagnosis as I heard it: “You are now a ticking time-bomb.” Or as my family doctor succinctly pointed out when he saw the report, “Wow, your heart’s a mess!”

Upon my very anxious query, I was told by the doctors that if I were to start having heart issues again, then I would probably have similar symptoms to those I had on Black Friday. I guess the operative word here was probably. Fast forward eight months to late July. We had been experiencing a triple-digit heat index in Indiana for several days. I noticed that climbing the back stairs at work left me unusually winded and with a slight but vague tightness in my chest, but I attributed it to the smothering humidity and the heat of summer in Indiana. In the back of my mind, I wondered if my heart was acting up, but since I had no pain or other symptoms, I tried to ignore that little voice. A couple of weeks later I had finished shooting a wedding when the vague tightness in my chest returned. I thought it rather strange because it hadn’t bothered me all day, and the weather was cooler. I went home, started working on the wedding photos, and fell asleep. When I awoke around 3:00 a.m. the tightness was back and didn’t leave.

I jumped online and tried to self-diagnose and talk myself out of any misgivings I was having, but around 5:00 a.m. I told my wife that I thought I should get to the ER merely as a precaution. I figured they’d run tests and send me home. Within about twenty minutes of my arrival, they informed me they were sending me to Indy in an ambulance…my blood work showed that I was having another “cardiac event.” Upon arrival in Indianapolis, they immediately performed another heart catheterization, and it showed multiple blockages with the most serious being each of the main arteries feeding each side of my heart, which were both 95% closed. I guess if I had ignored my non-symptoms, I could have easily dropped dead without further warning.

They informed me that prompt surgical attention was a necessity and they started pulling a team together for the next morning. When they completed the surgery, I had six bypasses to call my very own. It’s certainly not something I would have wished for, but due to family history, it was something that wasn’t totally unexpected either. The thing that surprises me is that while I escaped further tragedy by a narrow margin, dodging a bullet wasn’t something that lingered too much in my mind. What I couldn’t shake was the nagging urgency that life now seemed to possess: the realization that life is really finite and there is an ending point of our time here on earth. No longer was the future just an open-ended question mark with a vague, fuzzy date of completion. If I wanted to make the most of my time here before the transition of death, then I needed to do something about it. Now.

[1]  An updated edition is available each year on Amazon.com.

Ten Huge Mistakes Christians Make (Part 2)

(See Mistakes Numbers 1-5 in earlier blog, “Ten Huge Mistakes Christians Make—Part 1”)

Mistake Number 6: No Devotional Life

By “Devotional Life” I mean a daily time of prayer and Bible study. (Blurting a few “Help me’s” on the way to work really isn’t going to deepen your faith.) Because we lead such frantic lives and overschedule ourselves and our families relentlessly, we somehow feel justified that these things supersede a time of daily prayer. The intrusion of electronics into absolutely everything erodes this important discipline. If we never turn off our phone and would answer it even if we’re praying or reading Scripture, what does this say about who is important to us? For whom and what are you praying? Do you have a prayer list? Are you asking God to inform your day? Do you bring your To Do list to him each morning to see what He would prioritize as most important? Are you working to overcome your temptations? No prayer? It’s killing us.

Mistake Number 7: An Undisciplined Lifestyle

There’s a reason the early church practiced disciplines. Those who had been with Jesus knew the only way to live as He did was to practice what He did and taught. The only way to get good at it is to keep practicing. Besides reading Scripture and praying, here are some disciplines we must practice: purity, gentleness, perseverance, forgiveness, and frugality  (not an exhaustive list). A good place to start is by reading an old classic, Discipline and Discovery, by Albert E. Day,[1] or other devotional volumes that have stood the test of time.

“Undisciplined,” you say? “You should see my daily schedule. I get up before dawn to go to the gym. I commute long hours to work…” Let me interrupt this recitation to point out that many of us are disciplined about these things, but we are not disciplined in training ourselves to be like Jesus.

The cost of this enormous vacuum in our lives is staggering. One study shows that the lifestyles of evangelical Christians are hardly different than those of non Christians.[2] How can this be? Many have no governor on their entertainment and viewing habits. They live the same, act the same, and drink the same, watch the same movies, television programs and pornography, and divorce just as much. Perhaps this is so because we have adopted the culture’s values and abandoned those of Christ. And this happens because the culture has absorbed us to the point that our souls are withering and dying and we don’t even know it. We must be savvy about the lessons of R-rated films are teaching us. It broke my heart to read a recent post on Facebook from a missionary asking if the film “Fifty Shades of Gray” was as good as the book! I immediately thought of Samson from the book of Judges who wandered so far from God that God left him and he didn’t even know it.[3]

Mistake Number 8: Rely on ourselves rather than God.

Perhaps it’s to be expected that we Americans are self-reliant. We place huge importance on making your own way and sticking it out. Such independence helped settle the American West and win World War II. When it comes to faith, however, independence is deadly.

God-reliance is the central pillar that supports our faith. He is first, ever and always. Paul understood and practiced this. In Colossians he writes, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.[4]

We love and believe this Scripture, but do we fail to grasp how it should affect our lives? This means that the first order of business is prayer. Trouble? Pray. Sickness? Pray. Misunderstanding? Pray. National election? Pray. Work issues? Pray. I have at times felt guilty about praying too much!  Yep. “I shouldn’t bring this trivial little thing to God. He has more important things to do.” Have you ever thought that? Or how about this, “I have been a Christian so long I should know how to handle this by now.” This line of thinking may appear righteous but it is seriously misinformed about where our strength comes from.

You and I will never be wise enough, strong enough, or clever enough to make it on our own. NEVER!

Mistake Number 9: Defend sin rather than confess it.

Probably every Christian has at some time done this. I have. When we are convicted that something is wrong or displeasing to God, we quickly make excuses why in our case it isn’t so bad. We are masters of rationalization and artists at fooling ourselves into believing that our sin isn’t really a “sin.” “While for someone else gossiping is bad, I am really just sharing a prayer request.” “You know, no one should get hooked on pornography, but my sexual appetite is especially strong and has to have an outlet.” “I’m going to see this movie to understand the culture.” “I would help the homeless if I just weren’t so repulsed by their cardboard pleas for assistance. And who knows? They are probably making a lot of money standing there by the freeway exit.” “I know that the Bible teaches against living together unless you’re married, but it makes financial sense for us to do it.”

As a former pastor, I am sadly aware that many longtime Christians hide secret sins—as though God suspends judgment of our sins because we’re so special! Don’t fool yourself. All sin is abhorrent to God. It always will be. C. S. Lewis said it eloquently, “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”[5]

God, help us rush to obedience rather than to sin. Help us readily and immediately repent of any sin the Holy Spirit brings to our attention. May we, unlike Esau,[6] not give away God’s priceless salvation as he gave away his birthright because of an appetite we refuse to control.

Mistake Number 10: Living a Life Devoid of God-Worship

America is becoming a nation of image-fixated narcissists living with an entitlement mentality who put themselves above everything else. It’s more than a trend. It’s a frame of mind that infects us from the time as one-year olds we starting putting selfies on our Facebook page (helped by a doting parent) to the time we become senior citizens complaining about the quality of a free meal delivered to our doorstep. Materialism has so mesmerized us that we think it’s just a personality quirk to have 150 pairs of shoes or normal to post hundreds of photos of oneself on line every week.

Someone without God on the throne will put something or someone else, usually himself or herself, on the throne. We have added God to our long list of other possessions and give him a share of our time and attention. Incredibly, we feel good about having God as part of our lives as we apportion him a pathetically miniscule amount of thought. How arrogant we are to think God can be possessed or that we do him an honor to make him a tiny part of our lives! Read Job 38 to be reminded of who God is. The Bible is exceptionally clear on the disastrous outcome of idolatry. “Everyone [who makes idols] is senseless and without knowledge; every goldsmith is shamed by his idols. The images he makes are a fraud; they have no breath in them. They are worthless, the objects of mockery; when their judgment comes, they will perish.”^[7] Paul wrote, “The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry [italics mine] and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition [italics mine], dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.[8]

Every day we must remind ourselves that God is everything and we are nothing (but God elevates us to the position of his heirs alongside Jesus Christ because He loves us).We must consciously carve out time to worship, to meditate on God, to read His Word, and to pray. We must ask Him to reveal to us our selfishness, pride, egotism, and arrogance; then repent and humbly acknowledge and worship him.

We have lived in an age of ease in which Christian faith has been the norm. That time is over. A tiny faith built on little prayers that only seek personal benefit will not survive the times ahead. The Bible and history teach us that Christians will be persecuted and that our faith is made strong through suffering. Let’s stop whining about how the pagan world should faun over us (aka Starbucks red cup nonsense). Instead resolve today to love God wholeheartedly and abandon small dreams whose only focus is your happiness. Launch yourself into the bracing oceans of life where God’s wonders will be discovered[9] and stop paddling around in the stale tide pools of self-indulgence.

[1] Available for one cent on Amazon.com!

[2] http://www.christiantoday.com/article/american.study.reveals.indulgent.lifestyle.christians.no.different/9439.htm

[3] Judges 16:20

[4] Colossians 1:15-18 (NLT)

[5] The Great Divorce, HarperOne; New edition (April 21, 2015).

[6] Genesis 25:29-34

[7] Jeremiah 10:14-15

[8] Galatians 5:19-21

[9] Psalm 107:23-24

Ten Huge Mistakes Christians Make (Part 1)

Today is my seventy-first birthday. Funny, I never imagined myself as seventy-one. Old people are achy and wrinkled but I couldn’t imagine it would happen to me. Old people are forgetful and love thinking about the “good old days.” But me? Yep. The Dave Shultz of 1962, the year I graduated from high school, could not have imagined my life today. But here I am, and here you are, changed, different, learning to adjust. And don’t get too comfortable, because more changes are on the way. “Change is the only constant in life” was first penned by Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher who lived about 500 years before Christ was born. Apparently the ubiquity of change hasn’t changed!

In this everything-is-changing environment, many say that the church also needs to change, perhaps even that Christian beliefs should change. What, exactly, does that mean? What should change? And what should not?

Jesus came to proclaim the Kingdom of God. One of its fundamental characteristics is that it does not change. Imagine! In an environment of chaos, there is something eternal, everlasting, and altogether predictable. When we get up every morning we have no ideas what changes will come that day. The dog may throw up on the carpet. We may meet the person we’ll marry. You just never know. Wouldn’t it be good news to have something that is ageless and utterly dependable? We do: God’s Word.

Yet many question whether there is absolute truth anywhere. I choose to believe what God’s Word says about itself and what Jesus says about it. The Psalms declare, “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”[1]  John’s gospel tells us that Jesus is the living Word of God[2] and Hebrews proclaims that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”[3] If you choose to believe this, you are also choosing to believe that Christ and His Word are unchangeable and eternal.

I’m taking the time to lay this quick foundation because it is absolutely essential that we Christians comprehend and embrace it. If we don’t, we’re toast. Here are ten huge mistakes Christians are making.

Mistake Number 1: Ignore the Bible

Christians are in trouble if we don’t know what the Bible says. It is astonishing how few Christians have committed any verses to memory. Many could not tell you how many books are in the New Testament or what they are. We confuse the Bible with colloquial proverbs like, “God helps those who helps themselves.” Many would be hard put to turn to any verses that explain their own salvation. We know it’s in there, but we’re not sure where. Do you read the Bible regularly? Have you read through the Bible? What did Jesus teach about Himself? The Bible is eternal and provides the only sure hope for our future. We ignore it at our peril.

Mistake Number 2: Substitute Reason for Faith.

Repeatedly Scripture tells us that truth is not perceived by wisdom, but by faith.[4] Even so, the Christian belief system is staggering under the onslaught of our culture that demands that we accept its norms as our own. Shockingly, many Christians are buying into this mindset. We believe that the world’s brightest minds understand more than the Bible. If science says it’s true, then it must be so. If God cannot be proved, then maybe…and we wonder. If there are so many religions, then…and we wonder. If so many people say it…and we wonder.  Hear again Paul’s proclamation to a church that was infatuated with sin: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’”[5]

Mistake Number 3: Fail to form a personal relationship with God.

I could never begin to describe what my friendship with God means to me. We are in constant communication. I love him with every fiber of my being. He is my number one encourager and friend. For me Jesus is highly personal and the Holy Spirit is an ever-present helper. Because of this, I want to please him and show him that I love him. I know that He is taking care of me now and always. I can’t wait to meet Him in Heaven. My first priority in the morning is to be with him. It’s not something I have to do. It’s something I get to do! The apostle John writes about this intensely personal relationship with Jesus Christ. “We are writing to you about something which has always existed yet which we ourselves actually saw and heard: something which we had an opportunity to observe closely and even to hold in our hands, and yet, as we know now, was something of the very Word of life himself! For it was life which appeared before us: we saw it, we are eye-witnesses of it, and are now writing to you about it. It was the very life of all ages, the life that has always existed with the Father, which actually became visible in person to us mortal men. We repeat, we really saw and heard what we are now writing to you about.”[6]

In every church I’ve pastored there were people who had no idea this was even possible. For them Christianity was keeping the rules and trying to be good. How tragic!

Mistake Number 4: Pick and choose what you like about Christianity.

Large congregations of Christians meet every Sunday firmly believing that if they serve God that he will bless them with money and cars. Or that every Christian will be healed. Or that Jesus loves people so much that He will abandon the whole redemption thing and just take us all to heaven.[7]

Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers, believed that God had created the world but no longer intervened directly in daily life. “In fact, Jefferson was devoted to the teachings of Jesus Christ. But he didn’t always agree with how they were interpreted by biblical sources, including the writers of the four Gospels, whom he considered to be untrustworthy correspondents. So Jefferson created his own gospel by taking a sharp instrument, perhaps a penknife, to existing copies of the New Testament and pasting up his own account of Christ’s philosophy.”[8]  Sad that such a brilliant man thought he knew more about the Bible than those who were eyewitnesses to Jesus Christ and his teaching!

Are we doing the same thing? Fornication is practiced by unbelievable numbers of Christians. And what is fornication? Sleeping with anyone to whom you are not married. The Bible says it is a sin, period. Society says it isn’t. So we cut out the part of Scripture that condemns our lifestyle.

Mistake Number 5: No Church Attendance

A few years ago we met a couple who, like us, were new in town and looking for a home congregation. They stayed a few months and left. We run into them now and then, but they have stopped looking. The husband who, according to his wife, “studies Greek and Hebrew,” can’t find a church worthy of them. Really?  One gets the idea that he would advise Jesus on his theology.

Finding a group of Bible-believers and meeting with them regularly is essential to your faith. We need the messages (even if they don’t meet our lofty standards), the singing, the scripture, and the fellowship. We need people to pray for us and we need to pray for them. Christians are the body of Christ. If my hand were chopped off it would die without the body to sustain it. We need the discipline of getting up and by so doing tell ourselves that our faith is as important as going to work or watching the Pittsburgh Steelers.

(Look for Part II coming soon)

[1] Isaiah 40:8 (NIV)

[2] John 1:1-14

[3] Hebrews 13:8

[4] 1 Corinthians 1:20-21

[5] 1 Corinthians 1:18-19

[6] 1 John 1:1 J. B. Phillips New Testament

[7] See Luke 13:23-25

[8] Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-thomas-jefferson-created-his-own-bible-5659505/#usdk1IlI0PMkwTB6.99

That was then. This is now.

Why we must accept change in our lives.

My mother as a baby with her father and birth mother.

My mother was a remarkable woman. Her mother died of cancer when my mom was six and her only sister, Ruth, was three. She had three stepmothers, two of whom also died while she was still at home. No one spoke to her about her losses as was the pattern of that generation. My grandfather was a wonderful man, but times were different then and he was dealing with his own grief. My mother was launched into adulthood, a naïve young girl without even the slightest idea of what caused pregnancy. A gifted pianist and devout Christian, she went to Anderson College[1]) with a strong faith in God and hope for the future

Mom and Dad in college

There she met my father, Clair Shultz. He was the youngest of seven children in a family hit hard by the depression. Inventive and mischievous, he went to college because a Sunday school teacher saw his potential and talked him into it. Mom fell for his pranks, like putting firecrackers under her dorm room door, and they were married in 1935 on a Christmas Day when it was four below zero.

Their ministerial career began with the pastorate of a small church in Noblesville, Indiana. Two short-term Minnesota pastorates followed, after which they decided to apply for missionary service in Trinidad, British West Indies (where I was raised). Later assignments included some time in Jamaica and then in Kenya, East Africa. They learned Swahili in their 50s.

Change everywhere.

I never realized until just before my father’s death that Mom was the strong one in the family. She endured tropical storms, tarantulas on the front porch, rats the size of housecats in the kitchen, and the near-death of her infant son with whooping cough. She taught Sunday school with flannel graphs, did the mission bookkeeping, and helped start a Bible training school. She also managed the onslaught of change that characterized the rest of her life. One of her biggest challenges was when my sister and I, each at the age of thirteen, were sent back to the States to go to school.

In every place she lived, she had to change. She changed families (thinking of young missionaries as her kids), cultures, and devastating accidents. She traveled around the world more than once, documenting her travels in aerograms written in her delicate hand on airplanes and from distant hotels.

Mom five years before she died

Her biggest adjustments came after she and Dad retired. She was diagnosed with primary lateral sclerosis, a disease which gradually robbed her of mobility: first a cane, then a walker, and finally a wheelchair for more than twenty years. We watched her and Dad downsize from a three-bedroom home (filled with shells from Barbados and zebra skin rugs from Africa) into a two bedroom condo (with spacious bedrooms), and then into an apartment in an assisted living facility. Always she went to something smaller, something less. She gave away her favorite Blue Danube dishes, her bronze flatware from Thailand, and her Chinese buffet. When Dad died at 93 (she was 92) she downsized into an efficiency and finally, no longer able to manage on her own, into skilled care; first a private room and then a double. She gave up e-mail—her lifeline to others—and her checkbook. We watched her gradual devolvement and sometimes joked about her unwillingness to relinquish a final bookshelf of Bibles and well-worn favorites. Pneumonia precipitated her move to skilled care. Now totally cared for by others, her life had shrunk from the entire world to a hospital bed. Gradually dementia shuttered even that world. She died in 2011 at the age of 97.

That was then. This is now

I first heard the phrase, “That was then. This is now,” when they started downsizing. More and more frequently she said the words as if to remind herself that change is inevitable and fighting it is pointless. One of her caregivers, who also was a close friend, marveled frequently that Mom never complained about her disease or her losses. When we asked her about missing Dad, she would say, “That was then. This is now.” To a woman who years before had sacrificed her children to serve the Lord, the scriptural pattern had become her bucket list. “Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal (Matthew 6:19-21). I see these words as one of my mother’s greatest legacies to me.

We spend so much time resisting change and complaining about circumstances. We gripe about the neighbors who never mow their lawn and we worry about the solvency of Social Security. We desperately hope that cancer won’t knock on our door and that no one in our family will die too soon. We’re sad to think that the children will grow up, spread their wings and fly away, and then complain when they move back home. Living out my days in a nursing home with overworked nurses and hallways that smell like urine is one of my biggest fears is. I think many have that fear.

If truth be told, we cannot do much about most of these things. But a life lived in fear is no life worth living and I think we underestimate our resiliency and inner resources to adapt to change. The human race has endured the unspeakable in wars and concentration camps. Foreclosures have left us homeless, wars have left us childless, and disease and accidents have left us with lifelong pain. History teaches us, if we will pay attention, that even with such loss and pain people rise above and beyond to find meaning and make a difference. I want to be one of these people.

Things to Remember

• Enjoy the life you have.

With all of the loss and pain you may have endured, there are good things to celebrate. Try to think about what you have instead of what you don’t have. Thank God for your body, even if it is disabled or ravaged by disease. It’s the only one you have and you need to make peace with it. I’m not saying that life is easy or that you can think positively and change circumstances. Life is hard. But you are a survivor. That was then. This is now.

• Don’t play the “If only” game.

Many spend their lives wishing things were different. “If only I had married differently.” “If only my daughter had not been in the car with the drunken driver.” “If only…” we can do this for years and it changes nothing. We must grieve our pain—with help, if necessary—but we eventually can make peace with our past. That was then. This is now.

• Find a creative outlet.

God made you to create. He is The Creator and has made you in His image. Creating things, whether writing a poem or rebuilding a car, is extremely healing. I have written about depression in another blog, and I will be writing about living with pain in another. What I know is that deciding to begin blogging has changed my perspective remarkably. It has given me a place to process my past and to gain perspective from all those gracious enough to respond. What creative things can you do?

• Reestablish your faith.

Downsize your wants and stop accumulating. Beauty fades. Riches are fleeting. Anchor your life to what no one can take away. Reach out for God and you will find him. How wealthy is that person who invests in eternity!

C. S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Bingo. It is my contention that the Bible offers the best future for any of us. Those who cast their lot in with Jesus Christ are assured of life forever with him, above and beyond pain, sickness, and death. And it gives me great joy to think of Mom is heaven, lifting her coffee cup in a toast and saying, “That was then. This is now!”

[1] Now Anderson University http://www.anderson.edu/