Do Waste Your Life
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
-David Whyte
How We Do Die
When a soul escapes this earth
for the distant blue beyond,
“How did they die?”
is the first thing we ask
the ones who are left behind.
Whatever the answer,
we nod and say “Mmm”
with a certain degree of certitude,
as if how they left is more vital
than the countless ways they arrived.
When I go, I hope you will ask
“How did she live?”
Ask the people I have hurt,
And the ones I have forgiven.
Ask the ones who know
That the only real death
Is an unlived life—
Ask the few who will answer
you with the one word
that tells everything:
Forever.
“How did she die?” I asked Drew at the breakfast table. It was my automatic response to his sharing that a friend’s mother had passed away. As I listened to his reply, I began to grow uncomfortable with my question. Why did I ask that? I wondered. Do I really need to know? Death will happen to all of us, yet it seems to take us by surprise when someone dies. And this is good, because something in us knows that we were made for eternity—that death is not the way it is supposed to be. But if you’re anything like me, you might ask How did they die? from a place of anxiety, as if knowing all the possible ways for a person to leave this life will somehow prepare us for our own death.
The week my grandmother died, Drew and I had tickets for the play Tuck Everlasting, based on the children’s novel by Natalie Babbitt. The story centers around the Tucks—a mysterious family with a well on their property that causes those who drink of it to live forever. Though I did not get to see the show, I already know what my favorite line would have been. It comes from the father of this family who can neither age nor die as he counsels a young girl not to drink the water that would keep her from dying.
“Don’t be afraid of death,” he says. “Be afraid of the unlived life.”
Be afraid of the unlived life. As Christians, death is not our end; therefore, it is nothing to fear. Although we will always fear the unknown, we do know what happens after death: we will live forever. With this glorious reality in mind, one of the most important questions of our existence shifts from “How will I die?” to “How will I live?”
When I was a teenager, I read a popular Christian book called Don’t Waste Your Life. I believe its premise was good, but the lingering effect it had on me was fear. It instilled in me the notion that I had better not waste one single second of my existence on anything other than working for God, who was likely up in heaven holding a giant stopwatch, tapping his foot and tallying my wins and losses. Questions like What if I miss God’s will for my life? and What if I waste my life and God and everyone I know is disappointed in me and I enter heaven a complete and utter failure who just barely scraped her way in because she prayed the sinner’s prayer when she was six years old? kept me awake at night. I became so obsessed with discovering the ever-elusive “God’s Will For My Life” that I stopped living my life—until recently.
It has always been the hardest things that have caused me to grow, and having faced the loss of dreams, the illusion of certainty, the death of a marriage and multiple loved ones, missed ministry opportunities, and the complete obliteration of my brilliant plan for my life within the past ten years has caused me to arrive at a very different place than where I began. I know now that nothing is certain, that God is bigger and better than the tiny god I have in my head, that small things are actually big things, that what I can plan is too small for me to live.
Now I say: absolutely do waste your life.
Waste it on the children at your feet, on the one spouse God has given you to love, on your elderly neighbor. Waste your life on cultivating a garden, on faithfulness to the people and work you have been given, on making time to tell stories, on watching the sun set instead of a screen. Pour it out like precious perfume at the feet of Jesus, who told us that the one who loses their life is actually the one who finds it. Your life may seem to you small and insignificant. Mine does, much of the time. But Jesus tells us that a fully-lived life is one lived on behalf of the seemingly insignificant ones in our midst, the ones who have nothing to give but their own need.
“‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”
(Matthew 25:35-40)
It turns out that the unlived life is one that is carefully guarded and protected, and that the wasted life—the poured-out life—is the life we were always meant to find. That’s how my grandma lived her life: she constantly visited the sick and dying in the hospital, gave much of what she had away to others, and treated each stranger as if they were Jesus himself. Despite what the world and even well-meaning Christians might tell us, a “small” life that is poured out in love is not wasted at all. That kind of life is life everlasting.
So don’t be afraid of death, beloved. Instead, heed the words of your Savior as life itself:
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.
(Matthew 16:25)
May we have the courage to live the life that looks like losing so that we may be found in Christ.
Amen.
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
-Jim Elliot, missionary and martyr