A New Bucket List
Is it just me, or does social media seem like the land of bucket lists?
We all know that we are going to die, but for people my age the reality gets realer with every glance in the mirror. The pressure is on to fulfill our life’s dreams before our bodies run out of steam or our minds run out of marbles. I’ve scrolled for hours watching older folk like me checking off one-by-one all the things they’ve just done that they’ve always wanted to do and fighting to hang on to the vestiges of a youth they can never keep.
Do you have a bucket list? I’ll admit, I’m not 100% immune from wishing I were beautiful, highly educated, well-dressed, and well-traveled. I’d still love to own a horse, speak three languages, hike foreign trails, and visit Florence. I’d like to add an art studio to my home and revisit my youthful dreams of being an artist. I want to be healthy and vigorous into old age and be remembered with admiration long after I’m gone. Who doesn't?
There's nothing inherently sinful in anything on my list, nor is it wrong to take care of yourself and enjoy the beautiful things in this life. (It would be sin not to.) But in the wake of the 2018 Camp Fire, the loss of a too-young friend to cancer the following year, the loss of family members and others during the COVID epidemic, and even my recent 60th birthday, my urge to check items off my list has been confronted repeatedly with the words of the Apostle Paul: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1.21). And each time I ask myself: Is Christ really my life? Do I really want to live as he did? Do I really see death as gain, because only then I will finally see the one by whose grace I’ve lived?
How does my bucket list stack up against Paul’s? How does yours?
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:7-11).
