"It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.
So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?”
― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts
My time at home has often been trying to find the fine line of accepting where I am is where I should be and wanting to go, do and see. To pack my things, jump in my car and go, hoping it will turn out alright. I am not too afraid to do that, but sometimes you must learn to stay put, to appreciate where you are and how you can be fully there. I am not sure if I have succeeded in being fully here in a way others understand it, but I have tried my best.
With one life to live, I hope it involves a life without regrets. I want to turn 80 one day and think how I always chose to live fully. Everyone has a different idea of a life fully lived. Mine involves relationships, the continual search to be awed, to create, learn, listen, write, cherish, encourage, to not let fear be a barrier, be myself, and much more. More that is the makeup of who I am.
I do hope people leave my funeral, start a fire, enjoy wine and talk of who was once so near, but has gone off to something more beautiful...
