The road ahead would seem obvious if you knew how much road ahead there was. No one tells you that. No one tells you if you have just enough time to laugh till your belly hurts one more time with the beautifully strange people you love, if you have time to pull their neck close and whisper hoarse in their ear that there aren’t enough words to say what a love like this has done to you. No one tells you if you have enough time to try to change the world or just enough time to try change your own story. If you knew how much time you have to live, you’d know how to live. But that is the thing: You don’t know how much time you have to live — so you have to make time to make the life you want to live. No one can tell you how much time you’ve got for what matters. Only you can tell how much time you’ll make for what matters. Everyone knows they will die. They just don’t know when. So forget about the when... The real question is: When will you start to live? Will you live? Will you risk impossible things today so you remember how much you love the rush of real oxygen in your lungs, adrenaline in your veins? Will you forget thinking there is no way out — only a way through? Sometimes the only way through is not taking the next step — it’s taking a wild leap of faith. Take it. Do it. Live it. When will you lay there just to listen to the sound of him breathing in sleep beside you? When will you memorize the way her hair feels as you stroke it back from her brow? When will you bend over the cup and inhale the steam of tea and breathe in living? When will you have time to walk in the woods with no place to go but looking up? When will you be done with the armed way of living, the harmful way of living — when will you drop the arms you’ve crossed in front of you like some cynical shield, steeling you from really feeling? When will you join the brave and move the crossed arms into open hands, into open hands to receive and really feel the glory that is called life as it falls into them — How syrup saturates the pancakes and wind can lift your hair at the roots and how you can feel grounded just by inhaling. How tears can fall like rain and wash your wounds right clean, how those wounds are beauty marks that make you one of the medalled warriors. How there is common grace everywhere but it is startlingly uncommon to taste it on the tip of your tongue or feel it pulse through you. The question isn’t: How long have I got to live? The point is simply: You got to live. You get to live. Today. — Ann Voskamp
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:34:19 +0000
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