For the last six years August has been a time of personal reflection for me. In large part this is because I keep an alternative calendar. This is really weird I know. I celebrate my birthday and the beginning of the New Year on the Friday immediately following Labor Day. (I promise this is not because that way every year my birthday falls on a Friday.) The reason I do this is because on that Friday seven years ago my friend Elizabeth talked me out of killing myself and instead convinced me to accept Jesus as my Lord. So, every year the first or second weekend of September represents another year of bonus time lived.
This leads to me getting my New Year’s resolutions finished in September. It also means I have to think about the New Year in August.
The five-year mark was especially significant. I was just about to finish the sixth draft of War For My Soul and had just finished my first year of Greek at seminary. God had done a lot for me in five years.
That year in particular I felt I was searching for a purpose for the upcoming year—and really for the upcoming five years. The first five years of bonus time had been about survival (not killing myself) and writing War For My Soul. Those goals were largely completed—so now what?
On the Friday that year I was down visiting my brother in his brand new Newport Beach apartment. We were walking along the beach and he started talking to this Asian girl. As always he was talking and I was trying to figure out how not to be awkward.
Then, something unprecedented happened. This girl told my brother she was a Christian. Instantly, my brother’s eyes glazed over and mine lit up. I started talking to her and within several minutes my brother left. For the next six hours we sat on the beach talking. To my brother’s great chagrin I failed to ask her for her number at the end of all that.
That night while I was at work @ 24hourfitness several things happened. First, I was super sleepy. Second, my skin turned bright red (I was working nights so my skin was not so happy about six hours of beach sun). And third, I watched a movie the girl recommended called, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
In that movie, based on a true story, the main character has a stroke that causes him to have locked in syndrome. Although still fully cognizant he only has function of his eyelids so he learns to communicate using blinking. At first he is devastated but through the course of the movie rediscovers goodness.
As the movie ended I realized I had a choice that very night. I could either focus on the extreme pain of the sunburn and be grouchy because I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours or I could be grateful that for the first time in my life a girl found me more interesting than my brother and that I hadn’t killed myself five years before and that I was about to finish my manuscript and that I didn’t have locked in syndrome (for the next several months every time I prayed I told God how grateful I was not to have locked in syndrome). The choice was easy.
Further, I realized that I knew what the next five years should be about—focusing on seeing the good in life. To remember this I wrote out and tried to memorize Luke 12:22-31
He said to his disciples, "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you--you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Regrettably, this August I realized I had utterly failed to live this out. On the plus side I have three more years to work on it before the second five years of bonus time is up!
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