One Month to Live Day 2

At church we are doing a church wide book study and the pastor is preaching sermons based on this book. It is an incredible book so far. I love the concept. It is something that I have believed in for most of my life. The book is One Month to Live. The premise is to spend 30 days reading the chapters in this book challenging you to look at you life and making the changes now that you might make if you only had a month to live.

I have experienced this lesson twice in my life. I believe that both of these times were God ordained experiences and an incredible gift from God.

The fist came almost 30 years ago, shortly after my first job as an LPN when I was just barely 18. I was working in the Burn Unit and it had no patients so I was told that I would be floating to the medical floor and would be “specialing” a patient for the next several days. Back then, that meant that you would be the patient’s only nurse and they would be your only patient. Back then that also meant that the patient was usually in the final stages of life.

This patient was a young 20 year old college student in the final stages of terminal leukemia. For two nights I sat with her and her family, doing what I could to help ease her pain and help her die. I listened to the stories of her life from her parents, their hopes and dreams for a life full of talents and promise. Of her own dreams for her life. I was blessed to be with her in her last minutes of life and hearing her tell her parents to not be sad, she had no regrets and felt that she had lived more in her life than most people who have lived to be much older.

I was permanently changed by this experience. I knew that I wanted to live a live of no regrets. I was amazed that at her young age that she had no regrets and was content that she lived a full life on her terms. As she was also a Believer she let us know that she left this world knowing that she had also followed “hard after God” (her words, I will never forget them).

Immediately I made a commitment to myself and to God to live my life with no regrets. To even see mistakes and bad choices as lessons to learn, not failures to scar my life. Now don’t get me wrong. I have made many really bad choices in my life, and I carry scars, deep scars as a result. But understanding that you can still live a life of no regret comes from understanding God’s forgiveness and his ability to take very bad choices and make them lessons to learn and for compassion to become part of your life, knowing that your choices have made you who you are and that God can redeem them.

Most of my decisions in my life have been based on the question: If I don’t do this will I regret this later in my life? Or If I do this will I regret it. Also asking what God has in mind is asked, but usually this comes first and the answer usually is bigger than I could dream or wrap my head around my initial reaction is to duck and run.

The second time God taught me this lesson, it was taught much closer to home and my heart. Nine years ago, ironically this week, my baby brother was in a trucking accident and died in the hospital almost 2 weeks later. Again it changed my life. Again I understood on a deeper level that not only is life short, our time of death is unpredictable. One day you are hugging your brother goodbye after a visit home, telling him you love him and less than 24 hours later you are standing at his bedside in the ER knowing (as only a nurse can know) that soon he would be dancing with the angels.

I had just finished grad school a year earlier, was in a job I loved, but was eating up all my life, and was going through a separation heading into a divorce. Suddenly God reminded me of how short life is and how fast and unpredictable our days on this earth are. Over the days and nights of being at the hospital, sitting with Danny, praying, crying, and finally letting go, God reminded me that He is in control. That he has plans for my life and to remember to live with no regrets.

You see, I had kinda forgotten that first lesson. Yes I took many risks, I still made decisions based on not wanting to regret not doing or doing things. But I had forgot to include God in the equation. I had also forgot what was really important. God, Family, People. Not things, career, success by everyone’s else’s measuring stick.

My life has changed drastically in the past nine years. It is not the life I thought I would be living. It certainly is not the plans I had made for myself. But I can honestly say that where I am right now, what I am doing right now, I have never been more content and more fulfilled.

Where am I right now? Well that is a story for another night. I am off to bed now.

I will be posting more on this topic as I read the book. I fully expect God to remind me and teach me this lesson once again on an even more deeper level. Just like the Israelites I need to go around that mountain again to learn. I am excited. I am expecting life changes. I am expecting God to change and challenge me in new and unexpected ways. I expect to live like I have no tomorrow…because really it is not promised to us is it?