It's Saturday and I'm scrollling thru the Obituaries.....

Today Jim took Connor and his friend Braden camping up in Sedona.  They're doing some boy-bonding stuff.  Payton and I...we'll do some girl bonding...maybe at the mall?  LOL  Here I am, on a Saturday morning, with an empty house.  Payton is at an Anthem Prep football game with a friend.  So, alone, on a Saturday (for now)!  Strange!!  Well, it gets even more strange.  Do you know what I've been doing for the last hour?  Looking at Obituaries.  Isn't that nuts?  I was reading an email from my sister about a girl we knew from high school who was apparently killed by a semi-truck back in 2004.  I could not believe it!  I knew her, but we weren't close friends or anything.  It was like I needed to verify that or something before I would believe it.  So, through the 2004 Obituaries I went, starting with January.  I had to go through the whole year before I would find her.  She died in December 2004.  I ran across so many familiar faces from my childhood.  Some of them I had no idea they had died or why they had died young(er).  It was absolutely sobering for me to scroll through these names. 

So, I sit here with a very real sense of my mortality.  A sense of all of our mortality.  We are all going to die.  God knows, right now, the number of our days.  My "day" could be tomorrow.  It's almost as if we don't believe this is true.  And, what's worse, I don't think we "really" believe that we are going to end up in one of two places....Heaven or Hell.  They are very real places.  And, if we believed that, not just in our minds but in our hearts, our lives would look drastically different.  When we are talking about Heaven or Hell we are talking FOREVER, eternity, never-ending.  I just don't think its very easy for our minds to wrap around that because we only know the temporary, which is where we live right now.  We live for the temporary.  Why? 

This place, the "temporary", is our one and only chance to make the right choice.  Then, we will live with the consequences of our choice for eternity.  God is going to allow circumstances in our lives.  He is going to place people in our lives.  He is going to do whatever He can to get us to make the decision to accept His son as our Savior.    God has placed so many precious people in my life and, because I love them, no matter what the cost, I need to share with them the finality of the choice they are faced with.  I need them to know that God wants them to go to Heaven.  It is, of course, the reason that He allowed His son to die!  I want to spend eternity in Heaven with them.  I want them to know that they are loved by God no matter what their "story" is.  But, I also want them to know that they must make a conscious choice to give their lives to Christ.  If you cannot ever remember making that decision, if you think to yourself "well, I've always been a Christian" then you most likely have never made the choice.  I will tell you that I even remember what I was WEARING the day I "made my choice".  It was fall (October 2002), last row at Northwest Bible Church in Hilliard, Ohio.  I was wearing a khaki slim skirt, a t shirt and a denim jacket!  That was the day He found me and I made my choice!