The Final Moment

Imagine being at that point where you are saying to God; “Father, the hour has come” as Jesus does in this final prayer: This is it. I have lived my life and here it is. 

What do you imagine it will feel like to come to that final moment?

We don’t meditate on death to be morbid. We meditate on death to enable us to live more fully. When I think about saying to God “This is it!” in my final moments I would like to able to say that I lived my life as fully and as attentively as I could; that, with St. Irenaeus, I could say that my life is to “the glory of God” because I have been a human being “fully alive!”.

What I don’t want to experience in those final moments is that horrible feeling (sometimes experienced before an exam!) that I have squandered the time given to me.

I have come to the conclusion that the greatest insurance against this feeling of regret is Jesus’ words in the following verses “And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” It sounds too easy, but in fact it means surrendering everything. As Ruth Burrows says;

“It is one thing to give an intellectual assent to the truth of Jesus and to his role in our lives, quite another to believe in him….that is, to make him and him alone the ground on which we stand, the vantage point from which we view all things, make all judgments and choices.” (Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus, 2010)

May we today live our lives knowing the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit!