If Today Was Your Last Day...

I don't know how many people have heard of the Darwin Awards, but I'm sure that nearly everyone is familiar with the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest. Those that are fit to survive will survive, and those that aren't fit to survive...well, don't survive. Pretty simple stuff, I'd say. Anyway, the Darwin Awards are intended to poke fun at people that die while doing very, very foolish things---people that aren't fit to survive, if you believe Darwin's theory.

Here's a story of a man that earned a Darwin Award last year:

In 2008, a Texas contractor was working on reinforcing a radio tower. Things seemed fine until the worker leaned back and began to fall. After falling 225 feet, he hit the ground and was killed by the impact. Instead of bolting down a reinforcement bar, the contractor had unknowingly unbolted the bar to which his harness was attached.

Here's another Darwin Award story:

A Croatian man wanted to clean his chimney, but realized that a simple broom wouldn't be long enough for the job. He decided to attach a brush to a weighted chain, which he could feed down the chimney to clean it. The man went into his workshop in search of a suitable weight, and when he found something suitable, he decided to weld it to the chain. Unfortunately, the man overlooked the fact that his weight was a live hand grenade. When he began welding the grenade and the chain together, the grenade exploded, killing the man instantly.

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I don't think the contractor in the first story planned on dying when he did. Falling off a radio tower is a pretty dangerous stunt, and I doubt the contractor had that activity on his to-do list for the day. It's probably a safe bet to assume that the Croatian man wasn't planning on blowing himself up with a hand grenade either. Both of these people made stupid mistakes that cost them their lives, but they weren't planning on dying when they did.

In my experience, people don't like to think about death. We tell ourselves, "When I turn 65, I'll retire and get a nice place in the country. I'll sit in my rocking chair and read the morning paper, and I'll play canasta, and on Tuesdays, I'll go into town and play bingo." This seems all well and good until we face reality. There's no law on the books that says we're guaranteed to live until we're 65. As a matter of fact, we're not even guaranteed tomorrow.

You'd think that the knowledge that tomorrow's not guaranteed would affect the way we live, but it doesn't. I know I should kick that bad habit, but I'll start next week. That person really needs to hear the gospel, but I'll wait until tomorrow. God, I know I haven't been living like a Christian lately, but I promise I'll try harder tomorrow. How often do we say things like that? Once a day? Twice? More than that? You may not have tomorrow to get your life back on track, and that friend that needs to hear the gospel might not be around tomorrow. All too often, we lose our sense of urgency, and that can be a very dangerous thing.

Jesus once told a parable about a man who lived like we do. The man thought he had a lifetime ahead of him, so he concerned himself with worldly things. He thought he would have plenty of time for God later in life, but that wasn't the case:

And he told them a parable, saying, The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops? And he said, I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry. But God said to him, Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.

Luke 12:16-20 (ESV)

The man in the story didn't have tomorrow. He planned on getting right with God later in life, but he never had that chance. Like the man in the story, we might not have tomorrow either.

When it comes to spiritual things, let's live every day like it could be our last.