Life Is Worth Living

Once we reach a certain age, we can all relate to wanting to be younger. If you’ve been reading my blog for a few years, you know that I’ve been trying to use my birthdays as opportunities to measure my spiritual growth over the past year and practice gratitude instead of being bummed that another year has gone by with me still not well. While it’s hard to do in the flesh, it’s been a very fruitful exercise for me. This year provides the same challenge and opportunity for me, with the added layer of this being a “big” birthday. While I don’t have any of the things I thought I’d have by this point in life, what I do have is of greatest importance- a deep, personal relationship with God and a completely transformed view of life. What I can say about this past year is that I have indeed grown in the particular way I prayed to grow last birthday, and that is a win. All the glory is His! I had to choose obedience and spend more time with Him, but it’s only by His grace that this growth has been possible. It’s all Him, not me, doing the heavy lifting, and that’s precisely why it’s been successful. 😉

I’ve seen people reluctant to celebrate this particular milestone birthday, and I understand. I can relate to the feeling of having wanted so much more out of life’s “checklist” than you have at this particular point, and I can relate to longing for times in the past, as if the best has already happened. But guess what? God doesn’t want us stuck in either of those places! He is in the present, wanting to work in our lives now, and that’s what matters. There’s never a “downhill” when He is present and working in our lives today! It’s always “up” and growth with Him as we aim for heaven. Even if we are 100 years old and very feeble, our lives still have purpose and value that don’t diminish. Nothing is wasted by Him.

A few months ago, I was listening to a podcast in which Fr. Mike Schmitz was talking about how today we have the opportunity to choose to love God. I started thinking about how we have a finite number of days, of opportunities, to choose to love God. There will come a time when the life we’ve lived up to that point ends up being our answer to Him, period. We get to choose Him in the here and now on earth, in a multitude of ways every day, but those opportunities will expire at an unknown point. So as long as we still have today, we still have the opportunity to choose Him, and choose Him well, a hundred times over each day.

Prayerfully, we choose well and reach heaven, after some very likely purification in Purgatory! But the fact that today is the opportunity we have to choose to love and serve God really made an impact on me. Once we make it to heaven, we are in eternal union with Him. Now is our chance to choose to love and serve Him, and that is precisely why life is worth living. I started beginning my days by asking God to show me all the ways in which He is asking me to love Him today, and to give me the grace and strength to love Him well in those opportunities. It’s been a new and invigorating challenge for me, realizing that each day presents fresh, numerous opportunities to love the Lord well- through our interactions with others, through our work, through receiving the sacraments, through carving out time in prayer when we could be doing other things, through participation in redemptive suffering, through reading the scriptures, through interceding for and serving others, etc.

Then I was flipping through the psalms and came across this confirmation:

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.

-Psalms 104:33 (RSVCE)

Being alive is the chance to praise God and to love Him well. Only when we are alive do we have the choice to say yes to His will of the day, to serve Him in that way. The time for that “yes” is now, today- whether we are 10, 110 or somewhere in between the two. We want to spend eternity worshiping Him, as our hearts were created to do, and living for Him and responding to Him today can be what gets us to that ultimate goal. How powerful. That’s given me a whole new way to approach each day, especially when it’s a run-of-the-mill, ordinary day. Nothing is ordinary with God!

It’s filled me with a sense of wonder at the start of each morning. How is He going to ask me to love Him today? Who is He going to put in my path? How can I give my work to Him more fully? Will I be on the lookout for what He is asking of me today? It’s exciting to realize at the start of each seemingly mundane day that I have no idea how He is going to work in my life that day, but that He is going to be asking specific things of me. Knowing that something like a brief encounter with a stranger might actually be very important in His plan is a motivation to stay tuned in to the “clues” from Him!

So while in my humanness I can easily be disappointed that so much time is going by in my earthly life, when I put on my spiritual glasses, I can see that each day is a gift primarily because it is another opportunity to praise, love, serve, and choose Him. Another year gone by means that I was given that many more opportunities to love Him well. Praise God. It’s kind of hard to be bummed about getting older when you look at it that way! 😉 Mary is a perfect example of this for us.

One of the gifts of being born on the Feast of the Assumption is that it has caused me, in my mind, to associate Mary with birthdays and living life. It’s the perfect association that I might not have picked up on otherwise, but what better example of living life well than our Mother Mary! She spent her days loving the Lord, praising Him (the Magnificat!), and saying “yes” to Him. She shows us what it’s like to lead a life well-lived, and her Assumption shows us the ultimate goal of the resurrection of the body. Even when she was standing at the foot of the cross watching her Son be brutally murdered, she shows us that life is indeed worth living, because it’s all about Him. It was never about us anyway, and Mary always points us to Him.

Every day we are alive is another opportunity for us to love God well, no matter how old we are. That is worth celebrating, and that makes life worth it. Thank you, Mary, for interceding for us as and always pointing us to your Son. May we always say “yes” to God like you did.

Happy upcoming Feast of the Assumption!

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