Today, someone got killed on the road. It was not because of a traffic accident or any fault of his but he was crushed under a fallen tree upon his car. If we were the family of this man, when we get a call out of a sudden to inform us that this family member has met with such a tragic end, what would be our reaction? "Devastation" comes to my mind; a feeling of disbelief, perhaps. It would take a long while to first absorb the truth, then accept the truth by force and then go through the whole grief process. It sounds like a very technical process here but in reality, we know in our hearts that the realm of emotions that will strike us would be so immense and intense and we know we never want to be found in such a situation.
For one, no one will ever know what is to come, what is to happen to us or anyone we hold dear to our hearts. We will never know when anything bad would happen to. It teaches us to always say our goodbyes cos we will never know when it'd be our last. It teaches us to always appreciate the people around and never take for granted their presence, even if we've been pretending that their presence is so insignificant in our lives. It teaches us to always be our best towards these others. It teaches us the urgency to say, "I forgive you" and to seek forgiveness for our own faults. It teaches us that the moment to love is not when my anger has subsided but essentially, the moment is NOW. But we cannot possibly allow ourselves to learn the easy way by others' sad encounters if we do not reflect and come to a deep realisation of 1) how precious our love ones are to us 2) how unpredictable life is 3) if someone's father, husband, brother and son can be killed in an instant without warnings, so can ours.
It also brings to mind our own selves. No one put a "guarantee" stamp on our birth certificate that we would live till 80 or 50 or 30 for that matter. No one knows how long their lives will last too. We never know when is the day, the time, the place, the moment that we will be called to meet our Maker. For the fact that I am typing this now, God is giving me breath after breath. It is easy to breathe in and out so many times in a minute. It is easy to have our lungs taking in all that oxygen. When we listen to our breathing, do we imagine what it'll be like if after this next breath we take, there will not be another "next"? How many things we have dreamt of doing, words we dreamt of saying, successes we have dreamt to achieve?
Can we find ourselves praying every morning, afternoon and night, thanking God that we are still alive? Or have we also conveniently taken our own lives, our own continuous breaths for granted? If we but live every moment as if it were our last; the end; no more chances anymore, would we still make the decisions we have been making? Would we still hold on to anger and refuse forgiveness? Would we still reject someone in need of our help? Would we turn a deaf ear and feign ignorance towards a person who needs acceptance, love and a friend? We cannot tell our time and certainly cannot fix the details of our death (unless a suicide). We cannot say we are going to die on this day, at this particular time and thus, from now till 5 minutes before this time, I will not be bothered if I'm leading my life well or otherwise. What makes us think that now isnt the start of that 5 minutes? Instead of being caught unprepared and unwilling, why don't we grab every breath that God allows us to take and live out our lives to the fullest? Only then will we always, at all times, be ready to meet our Maker.
20 July 2010
11.45pm
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