I just stumbled across one of the most depressing essays I’ve read in a long time – an essay about the death of a long-time friend of the writer, who happens to be the editor of a prominent magazine for nursing-home professionals.  

Doug, the friend, had succumbed to pancreatic cancer six months after his diagnosis, just as he was about to enter his golden years (in the view of our local grocery stores, anyway). We are assured that, in the end, he died peacefully and painlessly. And according to the writer/editor, he did a great job of managing his last few months on earth, spending time with his family, visiting his hometown multiple times, and entertaining waves of adoring friends.  

Doug, he wrote, “found the fortitude … to wring some more pleasures out of life.”

The writer/editor said he learned something important from the bitterness, the unfairness, of Doug’s death -- to wit:

“We are all mortal, and that confers upon us an obligation. No, a duty. It is to do everything we can to put the most quality in the days we have — whether they are our own days or those of someone we care for. It can be said this is important at any stage of life, but especially so if we know the end is nearing.”

So kudos to Doug for being able to “wring some more pleasure out of life,” for putting “the most quality” into his last days.  

But hold on a minute. Is that what life is all about? Pleasures and quality?

I agree that our mortality confers upon us an obligation – nay, a duty. But it has nothing to do with pleasures or quality. It has to do with spending as much time planning for eternity as we spend saying good-bye to family, friends and hometowns. And that’s true whether we’re talking about our own eternity, or that of someone we care for.

I wonder if Doug knew what was coming next. Did he make any attempt to find out during his final months? To determine his best possible destination and how to get there? Did he prepare for it in any special way? And just as important, did he share his findings with those he cared about?

Or did Doug end his days the way most people do in our oh-so-sophisticated world, wasting that precious time trying to wring a little more pleasure, and a little more quality, out of life? 

"When we die, we leave behind all that we have, and take with us all that we are."

I don't know who said it, or even if it's true. But it's certainly worth pondering. Would you want to spend eternity with the person you are today? 

Perhaps a good place to start is with our thought lives. Are we often preoccupied with thinking that could be characterized as “hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions” or any of the other "works of the flesh" listed by the apostle Paul in Galatians 5?

If so, now is the perfect time to repent and trust in Christ, and to let our souls be permeated by the fruits of the Spirit that Paul named in the same chapter: "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22). 

These sound like traits I could live with not only in the here and now, but also forevermore. How about you?

If you’ve ever been told that you write a great letter or memo or email, maybe it’s time you applied that skill to delight the residents of a nearby nursing home. How? By crafting mini-biographies for their families and friends, based on in-depth interviews with individual residents.

What a lovely way to give an elderly person something to look forward to – and perhaps even a reason for getting up in the morning. This would be especially true for someone whose children are too busy to spend much time with him or her, and are too wrapped up in the concerns of today to seek out tales of the distant past.

It would be easy enough to come up with a list of starter questions: Where were you born, when, and to whom? Did you have siblings? Were your grandparents alive? What chores did you have as a child? What games did you play? Did you go to church? What did your dad do for a living? Did you enjoy reading? Were any of your loved ones in the World War II? And so on and so forth. 

Then, with the interview process underway, you’d be sure to stumble across subjects lending themselves to deeper exploration.

To capture the information, you could simply take notes. Or you could record your sessions for later transcription. Then, armed with a basic outline, you'd simply plug in the appropriate information, and turn the result into prose. In fact, such a story should practically write itself!

The finished product could take the form of a plain old Word document or a simple booklet. Or something more elaborate might be warranted, such as a custom-made book produced through a service like Shutterfly – especially if old photos are available.

I’ve often thought of taking on this task myself. Alas, I’m already pretty tapped out with my current nursing-home activities; at the moment, there’s no room on my To Do list. But one of these years, Lord willing, I’ll give it a shot. 

I can’t think of a better way to spend time than chatting with someone who’s lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the restoration of the nation of Israel, Korea and Vietnam, JFK and Nixon, the cultural revolution and Oil Crisis, and countless other events that their grandkids may not even read about in today’s history books -- and then producing a document that these grandkids will one day read with great interest, and perhaps a better understanding of what made the greatest generation so great. 

The western institution of marriage certainly seems to be on the rocks these days. For good reason, some would say: After all, why should a man sacrifice variety for a legal relationship that is quite likely to be called off by an unhappy wife? Never mind that married men are significantly happier than unmarried men. What's in it for them?  

It’s true that there’s a remnant of young people who are following the traditional paths of marriage and family. But they’re in a dwindling minority. According to the Pew Research Center, only a quarter of millennials have married by the time they’re 32, versus two-thirds in their grandparents’ generation.  

Fortunately, there’s still one group around to tell us what marriage is all about, and why it’s so critically important to us personally and to our society in general: the men and women occupying today’s nursing homes.

In 15 years of getting to know scores of these elderly folk, I have come across three women who never married, and one who had divorced (after lengthy consultation with her pastor) a physically abusive husband. That’s it. All the others in this mostly female population had been married to one spouse for decades, until death did them part.

Which is really amazing, considered from the perspective of this era of musical marriage, sex without commitment and feminism exalting career over family.

I’ve discussed this phenomenon with many elderly men and women over the years. They’ve explained that they view lifelong commitment as more important than momentary happiness, mutual respect as more lasting than fleeting sexual attraction, and raising children as this life's most rewarding and God-approved pursuit.  

Most are both perplexed and troubled by the growing lack of interest in marriage on the part of young people. One woman in particular recently asked what seems to be a pivotal question: “What are they living for?”  

Did the apostle Paul have it right, in his 2 Timothy 3 description of mankind’s “perilous” end-times character? He said the worldly would be “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,  unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power.”

This sounds about right to me. And I ought to know, having lived the mantra of money, materialism, pleasure and success until I met Jesus Christ at age 48. What's more, I can’t say that I’ve seen anything but an intensification of this self-obsessed drumbeat since then.

Fortunately, the old – and highly biblical – way of doing marriage is still alive today, at least in a remnant of our population. And we can still learn about its beauty and grace from those who lived through the last decades of its dominance in our culture, simply by visiting elderly nursing home residents.

Why not put such an interview on next week’s To Do list? Those you visit will appreciate your interest, and you’re bound to learn some valuable lessons about the institutions that made America great. 

Picture this: You're an aging widow living in a house that has suddenly become way too big for you. Winter is relatively easy; all you have to do is clean. But spring makes you weak in the knees, because that garden you built 30 years ago is begging for attention that you haven't been able to give it for years. Now that the daffodils are coming up, you can no longer ignore it: You go out and prune a few roses, rake up a bag or two of leaves and retreat to your recliner, overwhelmed and aching, wondering what in the world you were thinking when you replaced all that lawn with flower beds.

If that sounds like someone you know, and you've got some extra energy and strength to spare, maybe this is your chance to lend a hand -- and in the process to develop a Christ-honoring relationship with her.

If she's already a Christian, you'd be obeying the Lord's command to love one another (see John 13 and 15, for starters). And if she's not -- well, what better way to show the love of Christ than to help her complete a job that's probably breaking her heart?   

You don't have to be an experienced gardener. She will teach you all you need to know. In fact, she'll probably work at your side, finding new joy in spring clean-up now that she's no longer undertaking it alone. 

And what an opportunity to present the gospel! The spring garden offers ample opportunities to talk about the word of God. For instance:

• Pruning a vine or shrub? Refer to John 15. "I am the true vine," Jesus said, "and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit." Just think of the insights she could lend to this metaphor.
• If you’re helping to prepare and plant a seedbed, consider 1 Corinthians 15 and the metaphor that the apostle Paul used to address the question of our resurrected bodies. "What you sow is not made alive unless it dies," he wrote. "And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain..."  What a lead-in to a discussion of heaven.
• When clean-up is complete, perhaps you’ll be moved to compare the results to the perfection of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2 and 3.  For it was here that the Master Gardener defined mankind’s purpose, and here that mankind blew it by believing the lie and disobeying Him. And it will be in just such a place, according to at least some Christians, that the Lord will restore His perfect kingdom once again, for all eternity – another excellent segue into the subject of heaven, and how to ensure yourself of a place there.

 
That’s just the start. For more examples, simply google a phrase like “gardening metaphors in the Bible.”

Who knows? If you’ve never before experienced the scent of moist garden soil in spring, you may find yourself developing a wonderful new hobby – one that your new friend might feed by giving you divisions of some of her favorite old, and overgrown, perennials.

But most important, you’ll either be expressing your love for a fellow believer, or living out the Great Commission -- planting, watering and feeding seeds of faith that the Lord will make grow.