CrossTalk December 2007

From the CrossTalk ...

Life is precious...

By the time the Sweeneys have finished watching 'Strictly Come Dancing' on a Sunday evening I know the weekend is almost over and I'm left thinking, where on earth did the time go?

I wonder how quickly the weekend passes for you? For that matter, I wonder how quickly life passes for you? The trouble with life is that it simply doesn't have a rewind button -- every day, every second, carries with it its own finality. Time is our one indisputable non-renewable resource. My mother, who is seventy nine, commented the other week how she still feels fifty inside, that is until she catches a glimpse of herself in a shop window!

At the end of every day, one more box on the calendar has been shifted from the future column to the past column, from possibility to history, and all of its moments can be celebrated or regretted, but can never be retrieved.

Medical journalist Dr Timothy Johnson writes:

"...life has an urgency so different to fiction; at the end, it cannot be changed! The meaning of life is that it stops. We will never figure out how we should live our lives unless we fully understand the significance of the fact that it will end. And then what?"

Of course our lives are full of commitments but, as so often happens, it is the unspoken commitments that rob us of our lives. What do you think they might be? In the UK, children between the ages of five and eleven watch on average forty hours of television each week; husbands and wives spend three to four times as much time watching television as they do talking to one another. You see, it is the unspoken commitments that drive our lives and rob us of the possibility of precious moments.

A young businessman always made it his business to ask older men their regrets. At the top of their list was "I was so busy trying to improve my family's standard of living that, before I knew it, my children were grown and gone, and I never got to know them. Now they are too busy for me".

Life is too short and too precious to leave it full of regrets.

John Ortberg, in another one of his challenging and immensely readable books, suggests four regrets that people often mention when they get to the end of their lives:

I would have loved more deeply.
I would have laughed more often.
I would have given more generously.
I would have lived more boldly.

We always think that there will eventually be time to do all these things that we never have the time to do. My father looked forward to retirement to spend more time with my mum -- he died at the age of fifty three!

Leo Tolstoy commented, "What if my life, my conscious life, has not been the right thing?"

It seems a real shame, to me, if we wait for a crisis before we consider what really is essential about life -- I see it often. Wouldn't it be better to re-order our way of thinking and our way of operating to consider what it might be like to live life without regret?

This Christmas we consider, once more, the reasons why the birth of Jesus has significance for a world that so often believes it has the solutions to its own problems. There is one problem that we cannot fathom, though -- it is a crisis that always comes. But surely it is better not to wait!

Let me finish with these wonderful words from the Gospel of John,

"The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.... yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God."

May I wish you a joyful Christmas from all at St Marys, Cogges and St James the Great, South Leigh.

Andrew Sweeney

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