Big, bold, black letters painted on the sidewalk along a busy street near our home: “I AM READY TO DIE!” Do we live in an age of denying, dodging, and defying death? Death is a fact of life – a key component that offers both humility and perspective. Is it bravado to claim that one is ready to enter this singular passageway to what is yet to be? Maybe. Maybe not.
It seems possible that too many people are readier to die, to go so far as to taunt or to court death, rather than to deal with the challenges in front of them. What do they have to live for? Piling up more of whatever they deem as worthwhile? Cheap thrills? The riveted attention of the masses (or at least of someone)? They can never be the absolutely outstanding idol that social pressure goads them to be. They mistake fantasy for reality.
To live takes resources beyond one’s self and demands courage and resilience. To live well invites us to put aside childish, self-centered ways (the line of least resistance): to choose the path of integrity and self-gifting love, to discover and to become passionate about the gift we have been given to develop and to share, moved by God’s Spirit to work wholeheartedly to make this world of ours the place that God dreams it to be. In short, life to the full requires all that we are and all that we have. That’s what makes it worthwhile.
The question is: “AM I READY TO LIVE?”