Stranger Than Fiction

Rachelle, the kids and I just watched “Stranger Than Fiction” tonight. I gotta tell you – it was good stuff. It may not win any Academy Awards, but it’s still good. And for the record, Will Farrell can do more than run around a NASCAR track screaming, “I’m on fire!”

I don’t want to give much of the plot away, but most of the movie deals with Farrell’s character, Harold Crick, dealing with his “imminent death.” I’m sitting here now trying to understand what God is teaching me about death as well. Let me explain.

Back in early winter, I began having chest pains. When your brother in-law is a cardiologist, chest pains don’t linger too long before he’ll get you checked out. As he told me later, having me die during the holidays wouldn’t have been a nice gift for his sister, my wife Rachelle. Ah, compassionate bedside manner. So we ran a boatload of tests, and his words to me were “Dude, chill out. You’re fine.”

But the pains still come and go. It’s hard to keep telling yourself “you’re fine.” Almost everyone in my family has some kind of heart disease. So your mind takes off, regardless of fact, and plays in the land of fiction. And you start playing “What if?” It was so bad at one point that I started a file of my laptop titled “If I die today” – I started capturing things I wanted my kids to know from lessons I’d learned. And I catch myself living in an almost perpetual state of panic attack, wondering if this pain is the one that I should take for, to quote Fred G. Sanford, “The Big One.” Believe me, this eats on you. Go back to some of my posts about rhythm, pace, over-commitment, etc. and re-read them from the perspective that maybe I’m having heart issues. When people ask why I don’t laugh much anymore, I just say I’m busy so I don’t come off as a whiny hypochondriac.

Yet I’m learning some stuff lately. One is that life is bigger than me. If something did happen to me, my kids would be okay. Rachelle is a strong mother. We have good friends. And over all of that, God is supreme. He would insure that he would complete in them the good work already begun. And I think he would help them remember that their dad loved them tremendously. Life would go on.

I have much to be thankful, most of which the average guy doesn’t even recognize. Rachelle loves me well. I have healthy kids. A nice home. More than enough to eat.

I’m also realizing that, even if I do live to be a ripe old age, I’m over half way there, and time ain’t slowing down. I think maybe I’m starting to ask myself, not for the first time, but maybe for the first sincere time, what do I want to known for? I preached a funeral last week for my friend Paul’s dad, Bill Barlow. I spoke about the legacy that we all will leave behind, and it hit me as I prepared that message that “legacy” has been a question that has been before me over the past few months as well. How will I spend the time I have left? What is the one thing that God would have me do? How can I make the most of each day, and make each day a memory? Whose life will be different because our circles intersected?

Harold Crick was told at one point in the movie to “live the life you’ve always wanted.” What’s crazy about all of this is that Michaela and I drove to the video store this afternoon, and she told me about her dream of being a Veterinarian. At one point, I said that one of my hopes for her and Jacob was that they’d truly love their jobs. She asked me, “Don’t you love your job?” [SILENCE IN THE CAR] I said, “Well, not enough to miss it if I never went back.” She couldn’t understand why I was working at a job that I didn’t love, and I fumbled around trying to explain all of that to her, poorly I suspect. I finally got hung up when she asked me, “Well, what would you really love to do?”

I turned 42 on March 5, and I can’t tell you what the answer to her question is. That is a fearful thing, maybe more so than wondering if your death is imminent. Like the movie, I suspect that in the end, when death really is coming, that we’ll find the life we always wanted was a life lived not for ourselves, but instead we will find our life when we learn to live it open-handed as we give it away.

May we each find Greater Love in our remaining days.