Sometimes my head knowledge and my heart belief take a while to connect. The fact that I am going to die and one day I will be in perfect paradise on this renewed earth is hard to transmit to my heart.
Because here's the thing: I'm young. And so even though I am affected by sin's curse just like everyone else, I have it pretty good. My body hasn't started physically breaking down. I'm relatively healthy. Death does not exactly seem impending.
According to the introductory sociology course I took last spring, I adhere to the invincibility fallacy. This is adopted by most teenagers. It is an errant mental belief that I am invincible and tragedy cannot touch me.
Don't quote me the statistics. I know that it's a fallacy. I know how many teenagers do have tragedy strike, who do lose their lives.
But I haven't. And so I have to be intensely, fiercely on guard against the invincibility fallacy, because it sets me up to live unrealistically. Whether I believe it or not, one day I will die and I have to choose now what to do with my time.
I have to choose whether to let the reality of my death inspire me to live every moment for God's glory or let it choke me into fear and paralysis.
I often think of Jonathan Edwards' ninth resolution, one that sounds initially morbid:
Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.
What Edwards understood was that the key to living well is to understand dying and to let that spurn you to do good works for God's glory. No matter how much time you have left.
I may not believe that I'm going to die, but I know it. And so may this day, this Friday in May, be one more day that I can know Christ more and make Him known.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons and Thomas's Pics.