Life is But a Breath; Don't Waste It.

"Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin."     -James 4:13-17

The past few weeks, due to circumstances in my life, and in fellow friends lives, I've come to the revelation that life really and truly is precious. I have been reminded of this verse in this revelation. We know not the number of days we live, nor how many breaths we will take. We're not even guaranteed our next breath. And I once heard in a song, "Life is but a breath...don't waste it."


These past two weeks of my life have been crazy in this area. An older friend of mine, who was my math tutor, a friend of my parents, and an amazing man of God, was hit by a car while riding his bicycle about a week and a half ago. He died instantly. I was talking to a friend after his memorial service, and she was talking about how sad it is that friends and family gather most when death occurs. Whether death is expected or takes us by surprise, we take life for granted.

I got word the other day that a friend of my attempted suicide. One of my friends was telling me that she was up late one night talking to a friend who had a friend commit suicide. This friend also is dealing with the one year anniversary of a dear friends suicide.

Death happens. It's a curse of The Fall. And the reason it hurts so much, is because God didn't create us for that major of a loss. It's not in our genetics to handle grief in this way. We don't like losing friends or family due to fighting, or moving away, but death is so much worse, on so many levels. 


My question is this; why is suicide so rampant now-a-days? It breaks my heart to think that people think that the life they're living is so awful and pointless as to take their own lives...it makes me wonder how Jesus feels when He sees this happening...


We, as humans, take advantage of so much, and the saying is much to appropriate that "we never  know what we've got until it's gone." With suicide, or motor vehicle accidents, etc., we can never be sure that we will see a friend, a family member, until eternity with Jesus. And even then, there are those that seem to, slip through the cracks. 


I once heard a wise man say, "Don't squander your destiny," meaning simply this: live your life to its fullness; and truly and honestly, live everyday as though it is your last. 

"...all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." Psalm 139:16b

Don't waste your life, and don't let your friends and family waste theirs.