Monday 2 November 2015

Space and time

Part of my job as a content manager for a website involves altering the dates or time-frame in which posts are published. Essentially, I get to defy space and time, creating a new reality in a virtual place.

Outside of work though, my skills are bound by the only reality that matters. Where real life happens- where hardships, sadness and inevitable abandon happens- when friends leave you behind.

I recently found out that another one of my friends is fighting Cancer. This time it is Leukaemia. I had no intention of writing about Cancer. I have no right to. I am not the one who has to decide to go through undetermined rounds of treatment. Nor am I weighing up the pros and cons of different methods.  

But I am the friend of someone who is going through this. I am the friend of someone who has to make difficult decisions about her future. She has chosen to be positive despite this unfair card life has dealt her. She is relentlessly fighting to fulfill her calling and she won’t let Cancer stop her.

My friend, who’s known about her condition much longer than I have, is hell-bent on making her life count. She has taught me that life is meant for living. We had spoken to each other before I found out, no word of Cancer. Then again, people don’t go around announcing that they have Cancer. 

She could only talk about her plans to study further and her passion for social justice and equality. Surely, someone who is ill wouldn’t sound as strong-willed as she did?

That’s where I am wrong. A paradox- death drives people to live. Do I have to find out that I’m about to die before I start becoming intentional about living or find a cause to lead? 

When this bombshell dropped, obliterating reality, all I wanted to do was fall through the ground. Shifting back to a year before, when we were delivering newspapers and Cancer was something that happened to other people. Maybe push back even further before I met her, perhaps making different decisions that would never lead me to meet her. Or just fast forward to the future when this would all be over and I’d be so many years ahead to remember this even happened.  

If I avoid being here in the present, then I would miss my calling. I could abandon this space of destruction and cheat this collapsing time, but I would miss the blessing of being part of the unfolding of God’s good and perfect will. I would miss what He is teaching me.

If I stop living here, then I am no good for squandering the space and time I have been granted. Unable to account for it, I will become unworthy of humanity. The privilege of friendships and the ability to fight for a cause that adds value to this world, it would be foolish to waste it. 

"Don't waste your life"- that's a title of a book authored by John Piper, which I've never read- those are also the words that have been running through my mind for the past three days. 

I fear that in two weeks, when this news is no longer fresh in my mind, that I would forget these very words and the things I have questioned about the way I live.  

I fear that I will zone out of this current space and time, and embed myself in the future where there are only fragments of this present and no time for recollection. 

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