On A Dime

We were driving the other day and suddenly a guy on his phone swerves into our lane and was inches from smashing into the passenger side. The funny thing is he still isn’t aware he did it. This must’ve been a very important phone call, text or social media post! These incidents constantly remind me of the fact that death can happen in a second.

I’ve learned that everything today changes ‘on a dime.’ I’ve done some funerals lately and see the brevity of life. I’ve seen how quickly it all happened with so many families. It breaks my heart. When one is diagnosed with cancer, on to hospice care, then it’s over……on a dime. It may have felt slow in hospice but looking back it was fast. I’ve seen it with my own mom and several other loved ones. My mom was diagnosed with cancer, went into a very short remission and then it’s over. Cancer may just be the biggest play on emotions ever. Hope to hopeless, hope to hopeless, and so on and so on.

But there is the hope. There is something else I see each time we have to process through this. I see life at a standstill. I believe this is God designed. We all sit at a funeral or a family or friend’s house afterwards trying to digest what just happened. It’s in those moments where we laugh, cry and reminisce. We embrace a bit longer and we leave with an intentionality to get together more often.

The world we live in today gradually speeds up and only you can slow it down. It shouldn’t take death and tragedy to help us pause. We need to schedule the ‘lull’. We need to create the margin. Otherwise we regret. We regret not scheduling time with loved ones. We regret allowing our jobs to take precedent over our families. We regret looking at Facebook before we spend time with God. We regret allowing our hectic schedules to come before the One (Jesus) who allowed us to live these hectic schedules.

Today, let’s slow things down. In fact, I appreciate the fact that you slowed down enough to read this. Today, lets see life as temporary (James 4:14) and take advantage of every minute we have to do the things we’ll never regret. Let’s do things that make us forget to check our phone.