For weeks now my family and I have joined with hundreds of others to pray for the healing of a  brave little girl named Ashlyn who is battling cancer. Last night I received word from another dear friend, who is also being ravaged by that hideous disease, that he has been given only a 1% chance to live beyond a year. My degrees in Bible and theology don't make me immune to questions and confusion. I walked my dog last night and stared into a dark, starry sky asking "what exactly is going on up there?" I could't sleep. Today, I am unmotivated to get much done here at my desk. I am distracted, and I am burdened by the weight of their stories.  

In the last 24 hours my mind has returned regularly to the theme of God-given names. For those that have known me at all in the last decade, it is a message I have delivered countless times. It is a message based on my favorite passage of scripture, Revelation 2:16, where God promises the overcomer in this world a white stone with a new name written on it. To keep the promise before me daily I have a bowl in my office full of white stones that I frequently invite people to take after a particularly difficult counseling session. The bowl is there to remind me as much as it is there for anyone else.

So today, I come again to God in need of hearing this promise. I come on behalf of Darren, and I come on behalf of Ashlyn.

If you wish to listen in, a video of the sermon can be found HERE. Feel free to enjoy the opening music, or skip ahead to the 22:40 mark to jump right into the message. I will close with this quote from Dan Allender and his book To be Told:

"If you love the Author, then you must love the story he has written in and for your life." (p.6)

In May of 2012 Zach Sobiech was told that cancer had spread into his pelvis and lungs. He was told there was nothing more to be done. He was told he had just months to live. So Zach Sobiek, at age 17, wrote a song to say goodbye.

The song now has more than 2 million hits on YouTube. You can hear the song and watch the video Zach produced here

Have you ever wondered, out loud, or even in the silence of your own thoughts, what your own reaction might be if given just a few months to live. Would you try to meet someone famous, travel, or give away all of your possessions? Would you spend it with family, with friends, or mending bridges you burned long ago?  Would you spend it in silence and reflection or would you live as loud as you possibly could, pushing the very last breath out of your system? Would you spend it adding up all your regrets, or subtracting them?  Would you do everything you could to hold on to life, or would you freely let it slip away?

Zach’s story helped me to ponder afresh again today why it is that so many of us wait until the very last moment of life, often literally, before we are willing to do the things we have always wanted to. The things that are most important to us.  

It isn’t at all dissimilar to me the way in which people spend thousands of dollars on their house so that they can sell it, only to find that once all the remodeling is over, they finally have the house that they always wanted.  And if they had spent the money years earlier, they would have had time to actually enjoy the house they are now handing over to someone else. 

I have heard so many tales about people who have used their final breaths to reconcile with distant parents, forgive age-old grudges, or tell a companion how much they truly have always loved them. And then they die without the benefit of ever being able to experience the profound changes those conversations could have had if they occurred on this side of life.

Consider today what you might do if you only had a month to live. And commit to doing it soon. For in the end, we all will face a time when we have but a month to live, and without knowing it, perhaps, some of us are already living in that month. Don’t waste it.