What Really Matters

There’s a song by Jason Gray that goes,

I wanna live like there’s no tomorrow
Love like I’m on borrowed time
It’s good to be alive, yeah

The first line of the chorus, above, reminds me of the old cliche that says almost exactly the same thing: we ought to live like it’s our last day on earth. The impossibility of this has weighed heavily on me for the past month, ever since I first heard my doctor say the word cancer. I don’t have cancer, but for several weeks I had to live with the possibility that I did. And frankly, I found that the possibility was more than enough to make me ponder how I really do live.

Do I live like every day might be my last day? Goodness, but that seems morose, even morbid. It also seems like it might inspire selfishness or recklessness. If it truly was my last day, what could I possibly do differently? Would I forego the dishes and the laundry and the diapers? Would I jump on a plane and fly someplace exotic? Would I indulge some kind of bucket list dream and go skydiving or the like? The truth is, I can’t live like every day might be my last day if it means these things. Nor do I want to. I don’t want to wake up in the morning and think, “What if this is the last day of my life?” and let that question be the driving force behind my waking hours. So as well-intentioned as that old saying might be, I’ll take a pass.

On the other hand, I can identify with the second line of the song’s chorus, Love like I’m on borrowed time. As a Christian, this resonates with me. If we believe that Jesus will return someday, that we have a limited amount of time to make a maximum impact for Christ, to share his love and his sacrifice with as many people as we can in order to help him win souls for eternity, then I suppose we ought to love–and live–like we’re on borrowed time.

But there’s more to it than that for me too, now that I’ve faced down the c-word. It’s not about living like there’s a ticking alarm clock in your pocket, but about living aware. Some people who undergo a battery of scans and tests and long days and weeks of waiting to find out whether or not they have cancer probably want to move on as fast as they can and forget it ever happened. Not me. And I’ll be honest with you–it surprises me that I feel this way. But while I do want to forget the fear and the panic and the preemptive grief that assailed me in those days, what I don’t want to forget is the immediacy. The in-the-moment-ness of it. Time slowed down somehow, and every second was rife with awareness.

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My memories of those days are vivid. Brighter than bright. I remember piercing blue skies. Slow-moving clouds. The sound of dry leaves on the sidewalk. The taste of coffee. The silence of my house after my girls were asleep at night. Everything was palpable. The things that tend to worry us so much most of the time, like money and the news and what people are saying on social media, took their rightful places far below what really matters. What really matters, you ask? People and conversations and long embraces, and time spent in God’s Word. Prayer matters. A pot of homemade soup matters, when it’s a love gift for your family. The small, everyday, seemingly inconsequential stuff that makes up our real lives.

A few days before my biopsy, late at night, my husband called from Kenya (where he’s currently stationed for work; I’d told him not to come home until there was something definitive to come home for, even though he was more than willing to get on a plane) and said, in a pained voice, “I want to be there. You know that, right?” Those words mattered. After we hung up, I sat on the edge of our bed in my silent house and just let myself feel that conversation. It carried me for days.

One Sunday afternoon, I bought a puzzle at the bookstore. I’m not normally a puzzle person, but this puzzle was a collage of cookbook covers, and I love cookbooks. I took it home, and that night, after my children were asleep, I made a pot of tea and started that puzzle. I just sat there at my kitchen table stirring the pieces in the box with my hand over and over, piling coordinating pieces in little stacks, and snapping edge pieces together, finding these actions strangely comforting and satisfying. The clock on the wall ticked on, and I poured more tea and just kept stirring and sorting and snapping pieces together late into the night, letting the rhythm of it all soothe me. By the time I went to bed, the puzzle was more than half done. And for the first night in weeks, I slept well. It might seem like those were wasteful hours, spent on something as trivial as assembling a puzzle, but their restorative power mattered.

I’m pretty sure, deep down in my spirit, that when Jesus asks us to live fruitful lives with his return in mind, he doesn’t want us to be thinking that the end could come tomorrow, so we’d better cram in everything we possibly can and make sure we are running at top speed and be so concerned with making every moment count that we forget to be in those moments, that we lose our ability to slow down and live fully aware. What he does want us to be doing is engaging with our world–with people who love us and need us, with creation, with beauty, with the things that restore us to wholeness, with him. In fact, this is exactly how Jesus himself spent his last day on earth. He shared a meal with friends, spent time in nature and in prayer, served others the way he did every other day. These are the things that really matter.

Harmony Harkema has loved the written word for as long as she can remember. A former English teacher turned editor, she has spent the past seven years in the publishing industry. A novelist and blogger in the fringe hours of her working mom life, Harmony also has a heart for leading and coaching aspiring writers. Harmony lives in Memphis with her car-loving husband and two small daughters. She blogs at harmonyharkema.com.

Photograph © Bethany Beams, used with permission