Counting on Tomorrow

I have read that if you ask the average crowd of people if they will be alive in two years, virtually everyone will say yes.  If you come back in two years and ask the same question, they will give the same answer.  The point being that while people intellectually know that their is no promise of tomorrow, they tend to count on it anyway.

My work as an Arkansas Hospice chaplain, daily intersects me with people for whom counting on tomorrow has shifted to hoping for tomorrow if not doubting seriously they will see tomorrow.  And, what is true of nearly all of them is that their yesterdays vanished much more quickly than they had imagined and they ran out of tomorrows way too soon, or at least so it seems to them.

What my patients are coming to grips with is the reality of a Bible verse many had heard but never really embraced fully until now: "Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (Js 4:13-14).

While hospice patients are in a better position to see the truth of that verse, they do not own exclusive rights to it.  It applies to you and me as well.  The only real difference between them and us is that they have an acute awareness that they are terminal, while we have a fuzzy notion of that reality.

We're making plans for years if not decades down a road that we may be called to exit before this day is over or next week begins.   "Instead we should say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that'" (Js 4:15).  

The point is that while we make plans for tomorrow, we ought to live in and for today as it is all we have with certainty.  Serving God, helping others and enjoying your family must not be relegated to some future date for which you have no claim.  Jus' Sayn.