10 at 10 and 10 years from now

Recently, someone I’ve known all my life, has come face to face with the monster we call cancer. When I was told the news, I was stunned. I’m always stunned when I hear of horrible things that happen to people I know. And it’s always so sudden. I’m just eating a sandwich and then hear some horrible news. Are you going to finish that sandwich? Well, not now. How could I? (Seems like a good diet plan. Just read the news whenever you get hungry. Something in there will be horrible enough to turn your belly.) Sometimes with things like this, I just get the “commercial news.” Like the commercials for news at 10, “Tune in for more on such and such at 10.” Then at 10 they don’t say anymore than they did in the commercial. Then there’s a half hour about the cat who dialed 911, but what about the dying person? No one knows because they were so enthralled with the cat. So watching the news at 10 turns out to be just a waste of time. Time that I could’ve been doing…something.

So I’m just going to be blunt here, as if I haven’t been already. When people think of cancer they think of people dying from it. When people think of dying “early” (as in before the person dies in their sleep from old age), they always want to bring out the whole live life to the fullest, and bucket list, and other such things. So I think of these too, but if I knew I was going to die in say, the next ten years. I don’t know what I would do differently than I’m already doing… (Now I just thought about being 34 and not dying. It’s kinda freaking me out.) Yet, in my day dreams of being 34, I’m a lot taller… but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to go out and get my legs surgically altered so that I’m a few inches taller. I wouldn’t travel around the world, I wouldn’t try to be famous, I wouldn’t try to do spectacular things. I think I would use the opportunity to tell everyone I know about how I know I’m going to heaven and how they could get there too when their time comes. We’ve all been dealt our cards, but only God knows what cards we have. I don’t even know how to play this card game. So now we have to trust God. Trust him that he knows and has planned what is best for us…even if it hurts right now. (Think of a band-aid being pulled off really slow.) It hurts now but it will make us what we need to be. It’s hard to trust when I just want things to happen. Time goes by so slow. So very slow. And then suddenly…

So tell me, what would you do differently if you knew you would die in the next 10 years?