Why is Facing Death the only Time we truly Act as Christians

Throughout our lives, nothing seems more important than “finishing the race”, “providing for the family”, “making ends meet”, “getting mine”, “surviving”, “grabbing that brass ring” or any other useless and misguided saying that you can think of.  This, our only main focus sometimes is so important to many that they will resort to any means to get theirs or hold on to what they have.  Even if it means taking the life of another because no one will take what they got.  This is the driving force behind our reason for living and if question some most often find it very hard to explain why. 

This belief takes hold though and soon society is flooded with this idea and sensation.  Books celebrating this type of thinking fill the shelves and the air waves are amassed with television shows preaching this same idea.  Eventually it is seen so often that it becomes the way of a people and of a nation.  You find this philosophy being taught in all our schools and drilled into the heads of our kids.  All else becomes secondary to its will and it stop being about anything else except taking as much as you can carry or as much as you can get away with.  Its every man, woman and child for themselves and if you are slow or weak, you stand a much better chance of getting ran over.  This is our only real mindset and reason for existing.

But all this changes when one is facing death or under the impression that death is soon to come.  Those who can see death coming or the trail left by it often times changes prospective.  Tangible things are no longer so important anymore.  The little things matter most now.  We tend to treat people better than we did before and we see the light as to what living life is truly all about.  Now whether it is an actual race or a marathon doesn't matter, what matters most is how you ran that race.

Life stops being about how much you have or protecting all that you got and start being about salvation.  It becomes about gaining that promise of eternal life and in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “reaching that mountain top and the promise land”.  We find out that each day is not an opportunity to gather unto you all the treasures of the world but an opportunity to deliver a little bit of joy to every life you touch.  We learn that the only criteria from which we will be ultimately judged has only to do with how we lived not where we lived.  It is discovered that the only true path to salvation is not through words but by deeds.  We learn that the only way to lead others to their promised land can only be done when a real Christian set the example.  A tree will be known by the fruit it bears so what kind of fruit are you bearing?

Remember, all that this world has and offers will never belong to anyone.  These things are only on loan to use while you are here.  What you have title too means little when the day of final judgment comes.  It will not be a question of how much you have or how powerful or influential you are.  It will be about what you have done and the choices you made with the time you were given.  No one has to live with regrets, we choose to because the solution to that problem is simple.  If your focus is being an example for all to follow, the actions taken to that end will never feature regret.