you'll be dead

Something from Randy's sermon on Sunday that I wanted to blog here, so that I could keep it close to my heart.

That's right.. something from Sunday morning is still alive in my heart and mind on Monday evening. I'm as shocked as the rest of you.

"Someday someone else will be living in your house. Because you'll be dead."

Man.. I dig that. I want to cozy up to that on a cold winter night of midlife crisis and let it warm me up to living. Because living is all I've got to do.

I don't need to accomplish much or leave much or really in any way put an impression of myself on this world. I don't need to make sure I've got my accounts paid up or my afairs in order--I just need to get at it. And keep getting at it until .. well.. until it's time for somebody else to live in my house!

I was just saying to Dan-O the other night, while moonlighting as church-painters, "I've been thinking some lately about this retirement, savings stuff, and I think I'm in trouble..."

Okay, okay.. so I am in trouble, in the sense that I haven't done jack, and I'm thirty-five, and pretty soon I'm going to get into the position where--given the expected return on my 401K--my earliest possible retirement age is 413 years old. I realize that. But in the real sense of "trouble".. I'm not in it.

I don't need to put my house in order for the people who are going to live in it next. When I'm dead.