What would I say on my last day?

The first thing I would say is how much I love my wife, my family, and my friends and then I would try to provide some insight into an age old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

The problem with this question (at this stage of our journey) is that no one is totally good or totally bad. The Bible says that the sunshine and rain come down on both the good and the bad alike.

For now the labels “Good” or “Bad” are not permanent ones. God has planned for the wheat and the weeds to grow together. If we prematurely try to make the distinction between the wheat and the weeds we risk pulling out weeds that may eventually become wheat.

I believe that God is an “equal opportunity” creator, in that all people have the chance to be restored to a relationship with the one who made us. This is why we are encouraged to “Love our Enemies” because these weeds may eventually open the door to God’s transformation.

I believe that this age of human-kind is:

- a classroom
- a proving or testing ground
- an opportunity for many free choices
- an age of grace and forgiveness offered
- an opportunity to build character, to be refined by fire
- not a time of final reward or final consequences
- an age brimming with potential growth and transformation
- a time I call the “Age of Caterpillars” with the opportunity to soar as butterflies

This is a critical age of choices and decisions for each one of us. Gordon Lightfoot touches on this issue in his song “Waiting for You”. He sings, “I could be tossed in the arms of the sea. I could get caught between decks eternally. Waiting for you to ask what’s keeping me.

Are we going to be left behind as caterpillars constantly searching for the best leaf salad we can scrounge up for ourselves?

Are we going to struggle with the storms of life only to sink to the sea-bottom “caught between decks eternally?”

Or instead, are we going to soar into the wide-open spaces of God rather than being trapped in “The Small World of Self?”