My dear friends…
Life is so very short. A social acquaintance of mine died this week, and while we are not close, the man’s death at 56 is startling to the system. He died of a rare disease that was only diagnosed in February. And so, I am left sitting here today with yet another reminder of how tenuous life really is.
There was that terrible commuter train accident in Washington, D.C. the other day. People killed instantly. Then, before that, the Air France flight that abruptly dropped out of the sky.
And on Thursday, The King of Pop, and the Queen of the Angels.
Then Wednesday of this week a bomb attached to a motorcycle exploded in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, killing at least 60 people in a market filled with shoppers, according to a report in The New York Times. The report went on to say that it was the third bombing in two weeks to cause “double-digit casualties” in Shiite communities in Iraq.
People — ordinary, everyday people, not enemy combatants — go to the market and never come home. Or get on an airplane and never come home. Or contract a mysterious, extremely rare disease and never leave home again.
And life, itself, is just that tenuous. We think we have forever, and we do not.
Now I don’t mean to be dark here, or maudlin, but I know that I have been awakened this past few days, once again, to the reality that our lives are very, very short — and can end in any moment.
What that does for me is create a different context within which I consider the choices and decisions of my everyday life. How much time do I want to spend with my wife and my family? What do I choose to do with the days and times of my “professional” life? What is the purpose of the things that I do hour by hour…including writing this Bulletin every week? What is the purpose of life itself?
As you all know, I have ideas about all of these things. Ideas that I believe have been given me by God, in a series on conversations that began nearly 14 years ago. I’m going to discuss some of those ideas with you here in the weeks ahead…just for the sake of review. I want to take a look at them again, and see how they feel and how they fit into my life today. Or, better yet, how my life today fits into those ideas. Because here’s the story: I’m not sure that I’m living the ideas that I have been given and have, in turn, presented to the world. So I want to look at those ideas, and see how, if we believe them, we could all more closely embrace them, and more fully enact them, in our day-to-day experience.
One thing I know is that I do not want to have anything wasted. I mean, it feels as if I have “no time to lose” — that if my life is going to have meant something, I need to get moving, right now, on creating what it is going to mean.
This drives me to the central question of all of existence: what is the reason that we are here, upon the earth? Who are we, really, and what are we doing here? We’ll begin there next week. If you have your own thoughts on this subject that you’d like to share, write to NealeDWalsch@aol.com. In the meantime, make this a very, very wonderful day. And look to see what you think of doing when you think of making it that. What comes up for you? What is your first idea about how that might occur?
As we ponder this together, enjoy the week ahead.
Love and Hugs,
Neale.
Neale Donald Walsch, the #1 best selling author of the Conversations with God series, devotes his time to sharing the messages of his books through writing, lecturing, and facilitating spiritual renewal retreats. The creator of the School of the New Spirituality and founder of The Group of 1000, a nonprofit organization supporting global spiritual awakening, he lives in Ashland, Oregon.
For more information on the ReCreation Foundation.
Click here for a complete bibliography of his books
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