From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
My father’s death has changed me in more ways than I can list or even understand, but one of the things it’s done is to remind me of the separations coming. I am more and more aware of the way our time with people actually works: we add memories all while losing seconds—addition and subtraction in concert. Many days I catch myself inventorying the relationships with those I love, and realizing that they too will all reach this place I reached with my father on that day five years ago: the spot where one of us is gone and the other left behind. I’m trying to make better use of the time before then.
The moment we meet the people we love, the clock starts ticking. The very second our paths cross with another human being, we are actually counting down. Every meaningful relationship we have in our lives, exists in the ever-shrinking time before we say goodbye to them. We should love and move and speak with the urgency befitting this truth.
I wonder how differently we’d treat the ordinary moments with people we love if we realized that they were anything but ordinary, if we could somehow in those very seconds, sense that we are rapidly losing daylight—not to depress or frighten us, but to wake us up.