by 
I had an encounter with my mortality last weekend. Ok, I’m being dramatic, but indulge me.
So, a little bacteria was roaming the earth, looking for someone to devour, settled on me, disguised itself as pneumonia, and built a house in my lungs. I’ve had pneumonia once before, a souvenir I carried from the mission field after a short-term mission trip to Meru at the university.
I thought I knew what pneumonia felt like: the sharp pain when you breathe in and the chest heaviness. This time, breathing in felt like I was inhaling needles, and my lungs got a migraine and a heartbeat of their own.
Every slight movement felt like someone was turning a serrated sword into my right side. Breathing in was hard; oxygen suddenly turned to slime, and an elephant was sitting on my chest. Lying down was torturous, so I resorted to propping up three pillows on the headboard and sleeping upright. It wasn’t the most comfortable sleeping position, but it brought the morning.
One night, as I sat there, gathering sleep and feeling my lungs inhale slime again, I remember thinking, “Is this how people are found dead in the morning?”
I imagined all the “OMG, I can’t believe She’s gone. RIP Mercy” messages on my FB wall from people who don’t even talk to me in real life. I pictured my now blank wall, filled with messages of love and “We will miss you’s.”
Maybe I have a secret crush who will now never tell me, “I wish I had met you earlier,” not knowing my “earlier” comprised 51 kgs of mainly bones, deep-fried hair, and clothes that rotated on my body like the earth around the sun.
I want to tell you I was very brave, but that’d be me becoming a politician. I started to cry. I don’t know why I cried, but I was sad, in pain, and angry at this bacterium.
[Un]fortunately, I didn’t die. But I thought a lot about what is essential and what is not.
None of you reading this post will be alive a hundred years from now. We will all be making fossil fuel a few feet below the ground we’re now strutting on.
The houses we’re paying loans for now will be occupied by other people who may not care about our marble kitchen tables and glowing, flowing chandeliers. The cars we have even named and love more than people will be rusting in some junkyard. When your descendants draw a family tree, it may not even get to you. The essence of who we are today will be in almost no one’s memory.
However…
“… we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
We will be gone and most likely forgotten, but the work we do now will not. The lives you touch today with your God-given gifts will remember. You are God’s masterpiece. He designed the best thing He could ever design and came up with you.
All this will end, and we will be gone; should we be happy or sad?
Let’s be excited! It’s like God started an NGO called Humanity, and we have our projects and deliverables and a timeline. When we have worked out of a job, we pack up and leave.
How are you doing in your role in God’s NGO?
If you have the privilege of knowing Christ, you have the mandate to tell others about His saving grace and how they, too, can live eternally with Him. We really have to drop the gymnastics surrounding salvation and Christianity. It’s simple—we were hopeless in sin, God gave Himself to redeem us by Jesus dying on the cross, Jesus rose again, we believe in Him we will never perish.
If you can’t stand in a pulpit to preach that message, teach it to your kids. Let them know the truth, and they will teach their kids and their kids for generations to come.
I’m not the poster child for good servants. Far from it, I have failed and fallen spectacularly in so many ways that I often marvel at God’s ability to forgive. But I can tell you, I’m most peaceful when I return to Him to recalibrate my life compass, especially when fighting for air in the middle of the night, and morning is not guaranteed.
May you find your true north in Jesus and be obedient.
