Tomorrow's Adventure Might Not Come

So last week in bible study we were discussing the urgency of Paul in his letter to the Romans, chapter 13 verses 8-14 to be exact. He is speaking of the greatest commandment of Love and how "now is the moment" to begin to live by this commandment. Paul is saying that there is no better time then now to start loving your neighbors and your enemies and basically makes reference to the fact that we have no idea when the end is to come so we should act each day as though it will be the last and tomorrow we will be in front of the pearly white gates for our judgment. We got into a great discussion about the coming return of Jesus and how that plays a role in our every day lives. Most of us, not surprisingly, said that we didn't think about it that much and got caught up in our day to day lives. This isn't a surprise as I think most of us fall into this slump of wake up, go to school/work, come home, doing homework, eat, go to sleep, repeat. Not to mention our day to day lives are filled with over 24 hours worth of activities, thoughts, and problems. Where is the time to think about the return of Jesus! 

Being a disciple of Christ takes practice and a lot of work, but like anything else overtime it becomes easier (at least that is what I am told!) and you become more Christ like in your daily actions, incorporating Him into your "wake up, go to school/work, come home, do homework, eat, go to sleep". Even if that remains your routine, with practice He becomes a part of all those activities, effecting your decisions while at work or school, how you interact with friends, how your work gets done, and how meaningful it is to have food on your table every night. Once we can accomplish this, then there really is no reason to worry whether tomorrow is it or not because our butts are covered.

Heres the catch, this isn't in the slightest bit easy. This involves turning your life over to Christ and letting Him into every nook and cranny of your life. It's something I have yet to be able to do and honestly I have a hard time imagining it, but I can only believe that it would be an awesome thing and I will continue to pray to be able to do this at some point in my life. But getting back to our discussion in bible study, we talked about how we would do things differently today if we knew tomorrow there was no new adventure. We all agreed that it would be much easier to give ourselves completely over to Christ if we knew He was coming tomorrow. We would forgive all those who wronged us, show unconditional love to as many people as we could, hold nothing back and live the lives we all know deep down we are supposed to be living. We would have nothing to lose, we would just have to hope and pray that everything we did in that one day would be enough to over shadow the past years of our lives of not living up to Christ's standards. 

The reality is, no matter what we do on the last day, it doesn't make up for the rest of our lives and through the grace of God our sins are forgiven. In this scenario where we know the end is near there is no risk in our actions, we know what is to come and what we have to do. But the reality is we don't know when the end is so there are risks. That is what faith is, you are risking your life for something that you believe in. So what if we lived each day as though it was our last; if we pretended that we knew Jesus was coming tomorrow. From what my bible study group discussed, we would all be much more Christ like. It's a risk, but in the end what do we lose, if we are wrong and its not the end then we have only become better human beings, and if we are right (which one day we will be right) then we will have that many less things to discuss at the pearly white gates. So I propose this adventure to you, the adventure of every new day waking up and realizing that this day might be it so the new adventure you are about to begin better be the best one of your life. Now if we can start scripting ourselves with this thought process then things will begin to get really exciting! Talk about an adventure!