No Day but Today

Live Like You Were Dying. Rent. A death. A wedding. What do each of these things have to do with each other? Everything.

Yesterday I went to see the musical Rent in Orange County. It was the first time I had ever seen the show from beginning to end and I was blown away by the acting, the music, and the story. It was amazing.

Rewind to earlier yesterday as I sat in first service listening to Pastor Paul continue the series "Live Like You Were Dying" at NewHeart. He highlighted the aspect of loving people deeper by doing things that are unexpected and unaffordable and the importance of doing it NOW -- knowing that tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Rewind ever further back to Saturday afternoon as I sat and witnessed a friend get married. They each declared and promised their love to one another in a beautiful ceremony. They promised to keep Christ at the center of their marriage as the move together toward the dreams that God has placed in them individually and as a couple. The pastor then challenged us who were there to believe God for the dreams he had placed in us and to not let them fade away because they don't seem to be coming true.

And finally, fast forward to today. I had dinner with my friend, her sister, her dad and her fiance. This was the first time I had seen my friend since her mother passed away last week. There was so much joy and peace in their house and it blessed me to hear them speak of her mom and all that she had been through in the last couple of months with such hope and grace.

Once I got home this evening, I decided to watch the movie version of Rent because I had been so blown away by the show. Once again, I was enraptured by the story, but something happened as I watched it this time. All the pieces of the past week and, even more, the entire year started to fall together. By the time I got to the end of the movie, I was in tears as the cast sang "No Day But Today." I think that this is what I supposed to be learning all along.

If I were to write out the story of my life for this year, I could safely say that many of the themes would mirror C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed." For me, 2009 has lent itself to a perpetual state of grief - not that there haven't been good times, because there have been, however things were rapidly changing and people and places that had been constant were quickly disappearing.

I have spent my life trying to predict the future, to se what is coming next, avoiding risks until I could weigh all the pros and cons. I put most of my time and energy into creating to do lists and schedules and calendars. I've missed out on the deep relationships. I've missed out on the spontaneous moments. I've missed out on a lot of todays because I was always worrying about the tomorrows.

Tomorrow may never come. It's a scary thought but unfortunately it's true. How many days in this year alone have I had a conversation or gotten a phone call or text message or e-mail telling me about someone who didn't get a tomorrow? A lot more than I could've imagined. But that's life. No matter how you live it or what you make of it, this life will end. Tomorrow isn't promised to anyone. There is no day but today.


There is no future /There is no past/ Thank God this moment's not the last

There's only us/ There's only this/ Forget regret or life is yours to miss
No other road/ No other way/ No day but today...

There's only now/ There's only here/ Give into love or live in fear
No other path / No other way/ No day but today

Live Like You Were Dying

What would you do if you found out that you have only 30 days to live?

Deep question, I know. That question was posed to our congregation at church by our pastor as we started a new series, "Live Like You Were Dying." I don't know if it struck everyone else as hard as it hit me, but after all the deaths that I've been confronted with this year, it made me think.

I remember once, about six or seven years ago, my dad preached a sermon about how God took ordinary people's lives and made them extraordinary (thus the title of this blog). He used biblical heroes like Queen Esther, King David, and the apostle Peter as examples, and I remember, at sixteen, how I desperately wished to do something extraordinary. Something that, when I die, I will be remembered for. To date, I have done nothing truly extraordinary. Sure, I've done things that have given me a sense of accomplishment, but nothing that I could look back on and say, "Yes, that was truly extraordinary."

Which brings me back to last Sunday.

"If your past is covered by God's grace and your future his covered by God's care, where else can you live but the present?" Yeah, that one was for me. I live for calendars and schedules and for the future and so many times miss out what is going on RIGHT NOW, in the present. I operate in the "someday," knowing that it's a cop-out for not dealing with what is. The reality is that someday may never come and tomorrow is not promised.

So how does the ordinary become extraordinary? I'm not sure that I can answer that quite yet, but I can say this... The ordinary stays ordinary by staying where it is comfortable.