Written by by Shelly Brown
Have you ever had a “stop in your tracks” type of moment in your life? A moment where you realize that nothing else really matters. Your life successes no longer matter. Building your dream home no longer matters. Your profession no longer matters. Your coveted season tickets to your favorite sports team suddenly doesn’t matter. Your awards you’ve accumulated over the years no longer matter.
What kind of moment causes everything else to seem so incredibly insignificant?
The moment you hear that your thirteen year old daughter is now fighting for her life. The moment when you hear that your cancer has spread. The moment when you hear that your husband of 30 years no longer wants to be your husband. The moment when you hear your adult child has made a tragic life-altering choice. I can describe these scenes because sadly, these are fresh realities of women I know and love.
Moments like these, take our hearts and minds to places we never knew existed. We learn how frail we are in our humanity. We realize that at the end of the day, all that really matters is something so intangible that money can’t buy it, dreams can’t fulfill it, the brightest minds can’t create it or duplicate it.
When we have one of those “stop in your tracks” type of moments, and I pray, oh how I pray, that these moments are few and far between in your life, we immediately, as if instinctively, do one of two things: 1) in longing desperation we turn our hearts toward heaven; or 2) in indignant anger we shake our fist toward heaven.
Either way, we look toward our Creator. Instinctively, we embrace Him or we blame Him. We look to Him to be our refuge and comfort or we look to Him to cast blame and outrage.
It is in these “stop in your tracks” moments when we are forced to come to terms with our own mortality. Our frailness. Our insufficiency. Our brokenness. Our utter dependence on our Creator.
So what does matter in moments like these? What causes us to turn our hearts to Him instead of shake our fist toward Him?
It is the intangible becoming tangible … embracing the supernatural love of God poured out all over us. It is experiencing first hand the supernatural phenomenon of having great strength in our weakest, most vulnerable moment. It is drawing on the resurrection power of Christ to sustain us. It is the eternal … knowing and accepting that every life truly is a vapor, but eternity is never-ending. It is loving God and loving others. Jesus said, in Matthew 22 that “the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind.” Then Jesus said, the second greatest commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Y’all, THAT’S what really matters!
I am determined like never before to focus on what really matters. Time is short! Oh so short. I have responsibilities, goals and dreams, all of which I will continue to press into daily, but, with a newly determined eternal focus of loving God and loving others.