the end of the journey.
The only motto I can remember from my childhood is the one taught me by the Boy Scouts: ‘Be prepared.’ In order to get my award for a camping trek, I had to satisfy the examiners that I had prepared for all sorts of exigencies. How do you pitch your tent when the ground is frozen? How do you find the right route when the wind blows the instructions from your hand? How do you light a fire to cook a meal if the matches are too sodden?
If the examiners had paid a lightning visit during those hours of emergency, would they have declared me ready to tackle the next award project?
Jesus told a story about the owner of an enterprise who entrusted its management to various people. When the owner paid a surprise visit, he found them asleep and the project in a shambles. Jesus’ point was that God is like the owner, and might call us from our earth responsibilities at any time.
This reminds me of another Boy Scout saying: ‘The rent we pay for being allowed to live on earth is to be useful.’
We need always to be on our toes, so that if death suddenly takes us, we are ready in our spirits, doing what we are meant to be doing at that moment, and ready for whatever lies in store for us next.
* * *
Gather together the fragments of your livesmake good endingsDo not pine away …Seek to live from the depths of your woundsAccumulate timeless treasure.
My aged friend Neville was resigned to dying, but he was not ready to die well. Fortunately for him, the first time he seemed at death’s door he had a dream which presaged a recovery. This gave him another opportunity to get into a right state to die.
He dreamed he was in a large airport departure lounge. He began walking out to the runway with his pile of black suitcases, but the cases proved to be too heavy. He had to wheel them back into the airport lounge and unpack them. There was one suitcase inside another, each slightly smaller. Eventually, when the suitcases were all unpacked, he left them behind in the departure lounge, and walked nobly to the runway with nothing but a leotard.
It is good to depart life in the beauty of simplicity. We can take nothing with us, and there is nothing worse, either for ourselves or for our loved ones, than to leave behind a mess. The time to learn simplicity is now.
Jesus advises us to be like someone who has to look after a house for the owner. We must be ready for the owner to summon us at any time to give an account (see Matthew 24:44–6).
Here are three things to help us live like this:
1 Get rid of clutter and things we do not need.
2 Make a will.
3 Keep in one place, in a tidy form, all the information our next of kin would need if we suddenly died.
This is a way of being unselfish, so that we do not leave an unnecessary burden for someone else to carry.
Both my parents got inoperable cancer at about the age of 57. At that same age I had an inexplicable and continuing stomach pain. The night before I went to the doctor, I could not sleep. The future looked like a dark, downward-sloping tunnel. I was ready to go through the tunnel, but I suddenly realized how much I relished the gift of life.
How wonderful life is, I thought – and we have only one life to live. There were places I would never now go to, and things I would never now do. I asked myself, ‘On my deathbed, what bit of life will I most regret never having savoured? What place will I most regret never having visited? What thing will I most regret never having done?’
There would not be time for much, but if I acted quickly there would be time to see, savour or do the most important thing I had missed out on so far. I thought about various things, such as swimming with dolphins, then I decided what was priority number one: I would go to Venice. ‘It would be a crime to have lived on Planet Earth without seeing that jewel of civilization,’ I told myself.
The doctor told me I had pulled a stomach muscle in the gym. I was as fit as a fiddle.
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