Life in a Nutshell

There was a time when I never gave a thought to the fact that life tends to pile up. Minutes become hours, days, months and then years. While I procrastinated, life was relentlessly slipping away and all the things I wanted to do someday slipped away with the years. Whoever said that "life begins at forty"? At forty, I was still wet behind the ears. Fifty was good, but still there was plenty of so much time ahead of me. Through my sixties, I was busy being a grandma --- still water skiing, still rollerblading, still having fun. I don't really know when my age became something to worry about. My mother died at seventy-two and my father at seventy-eight, so perhaps hitting seventy opened my eyes to my own mortality.We suddenly find ourselves circling the drain and the current is swift here in the golden age rapids. When you read the obits in the paper and see that someone died today or a movie star passed away at sixty-eight or eighty-two, your brain tells you that they had a nice long life. Truly, life is never long enough. The only day that counts is today and we all want to get through it and have another one tomorrow. Even people in terrible circumstances desire to live long enough to overcome their unfortunate problems and have a period of happiness. There is a passage in The Bible, Psalm 39, that says (paraphrased)---"Even though I am bowed and bloody, beaten down by life---please, let me recover and be happy once more before I die." There it is in a nutshell --- we know there is Heaven and look forward to being there, but please Lord, not today! God must think we are terrible ingrates.