.: a movie script ending :.

I often get the same odd feeling right after I have had a great conversation with some friends, or after I have preached or taught at a youth group or in church, or even after I have gotten off the phone with someone whom I have been meaning to talk to for some time. The feeling is one of a strong sense that those words will be my very last... that I am in fact going to die some sort of tragic death and that those words - that moment in time when I truly connected with the heart of another individual or group of people (and vice versa) - will be my last. That moment, those words, those particular themes of conversation, will echo into the future whenever people think back on the life of Dave McAllister.



I had that feeling last Saturday after having lunch with some friends, and I was strangley okay with my impending death. A car accident... a sudden heart attack... something goes wrong and I don't survive... and that lunch was my last moment on this earth. That part of my heart and mind brings some of the deepest feelings into the frontal lob of my brain in such a way that I don't know whether to laugh out of "what a ride it has been", or to cry because I could have done so much more.



I recently heard of the scene in which someone was asked of what they would do with the next 20 years they had been given because of their heart operation, and that brought me back to this theme in my life - "living a life that will be remembered". A speaker recently reminded his listeners that all secrets will one day come to surface. No event or action or moment in time, no matter how dark or isolated, will not one day be revealed and exposed. And what will it be for you and I that everyone will see and have to reckon with in the face of who they thought us to be? I have secrets, as do you. Will they shatter the message that I wanted to leave with my life? Will they tarnish the example that I would hope to leave?



I am not trying to be deep... I am only expressing the given centerpoint of my thoughts and desires as of ten minutes ago. I am being faced with the fact that I too will one day perish, and with my one life, I want to go in a way that shakes the norm and rattles quiet motionless lives. But if a simple death is in my future, I guess that will have to do, for ultimately I am called to trust in a God who controls my end as He originated my beginning. Such things certainly impact a lunch appointment at Red Robin or the like, for my words are made memories in the lives of those who speak and hear them.