No regrets

Surely there is nothing like the passing of a season to remind us how fleeting life is - a handbreadth, a vapor, a shadow. This summer I've had a couple of reminders of how fragile it is as well.

At the end of July my 23 year-old son fell 20 feet from a roof onto concrete (he's a roofer). In a minute his life was changed. Fortunately his mobility and brain function were spared, but his arm is still in a cast, his face still numb from surgery and he may never regain the formerly perfect vision of one eye (though he can see out of it - iffy at first).

Then about a week ago I got an email from the son of former neighbors. His mother, my friend, whom I lived next to for 24 years and was getting treatments for cancer had taken a sudden turn for the worse. In fact, I discovered when I visited her in hospital, she had nearly died a few days earlier and was now facing an uncertain future with an inoperable tumor that hadn't shrunk with radiation and another one that was interfering with her breathing.

These glimpses of the valley of the shadow are sobering. They remind me that tomorrow may not turn out as I expect. In fact, there are no guarantees that I'll even have a tomorrow... though I most likely will - and you probably will too. But we won't have forever.

So let's do our best to live each day to the full, letting God do whatever He wants in and through us, so that when our time is up, when it's our life that disappears like a fog, we will have no regrets.

"So teach us to number our days,

That we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Psalm 90:12

(Update - September 4th: The friend I mention in paragraph 3 above ... she died last night.)

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