The Impossible Thing

There are some things that are just impossible to do! Maybe you have tried them, for example, probably none of us can touch our elbow to our ear. Or wiggle one toe without wiggling the other ones. These are just impossible to do!

But there is something else that is also hard to do. i won’t say it is impossible to do, but it is hard! This is what it is: Can you think about death for five minutes?

“What?” you say, “that’s easy to do! Just to think about death for five minutes? Why, anyone can do that!”

But — but, wait a minute. Did you ever try it? Were you ever able to think about death for five minutes without thinking about anything else? Without your mind wandering? Without remembering something you have to do or somewhere you plan to go? Do you really think you could? Try it once.

One day at school my teacher asked us a strange question. (This was not at a Christian school.) She asked us, “Suppose you knew you were going to die in one month. What would you do?”

What a scary thought! But the students, who were older than you are, had many different answers. Some said, “I would do good things for other people so they would remember me as a nice person.” Some said, “I would go to my parents and tell them I was sorry for the things I had done.” Others said, “I would do a lot of things I’ve always wanted to do, like go to Alaska or travel around the world.” And some even admitted, “I would start going to church and looking for God.”

Then the teacher asked us an important question. She said, “We don’t even know that we will live another month! Why do we wait to do these things? Why don’t we do them now?”

Did you stop to think what you would do if you were told that you would die in a day or so? That could happen, you know. Any of us may die any day. And if you had cancer or some other terrible disease, as even boys and girls get, you would know that you had to die soon. You would know that your days were numbered.

Can you think about death for five minutes?

The Bible tells us to number our days, doesn’t it? Do you know what that means? That is just like crossing off the days on your calendar as they pass, as you might do in school. Or listening to the minutes falling away forever as the clock ticks and ticks.

What would you do if you knew you were going to die in one month? What would you do if you knew you had to die tomorrow? I think you would find a Bible and read it every minute that you had left. You would also pray, pray, pray as you never had prayed before. You would not waste even one minute with such little things as games, laughing, or fun.

But — we don’t know that we will live even one more minute. And yet we are wasting our whole life away not even thinking about God.

Shouldn’t we think about God a lot more than we do? Shouldn’t we think about death a lot more than we do? How many of us can do the impossible thing — how many of us can think only about death for five short minutes?

— SW

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