Time The Avenger

I got a "tweet" a while back from a sport's journalist I follow who was paying respects to an esteemed colleague of his who had suddenly died.

I did not recognize the deceased writer's name or where he was from so for some odd reason - perhaps morbid curiosity - I looked up his profile on Twitter. I was stunned with what I found there.He had sent out his last tweet only seven hours before, at 11:17pm, right before going to bed in his hotel room.

The tweet was normal stuff, a quick goodnight and a shout out to a few guys he knew about getting together the next day. He presumably then went to bed where, sometime before dawn, he suffered a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. That's it. A sudden and unexpected exit that hopefully, for him, was just part of a quiet dream that never ended and looked a lot like heaven.

It seems so stunning to me that it can just end like that and I admit that this tweet, which I read months ago, still haunts me in a way that I can barely put into words. It's not about what that writer would have done differently had he known it was his last night on this earth, it's about recognizing that none of us ever gets to know the exact moment of our end and, as such, we should focus on enriching what we know we can in our lives, namely that thing called "now".

Solomon warns us repeatedly in Ecclesiastes that time is fleeting and that life is a meaningless chasing after the wind, especially without God there to guide the journey. Yet so many of us, every single day, choose to go it alone. And yet there is never a "good" time to go. There's always unfinished business, a life still in full swing, a love still not fully claimed, a child still not fully raised or a grandchild not yet seen.  I don't think a single person on this earth dies without saying "Wait a second here.."

But time, that ultimate avenger, has no more seconds to give. And our best defense is in knowing that, with God at our side, we exposed time for what he really was anyway; just a shiny little thing between here and there, that may have framed our days, but not our lives.