WAYNE FOWLER: Marching to the beat of a faster drummer

“Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.”

Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse agrees with those words from his friends. In announcing his terminal cancer prognosis Sasse writes, “Death is a wicked thief, and pursues us all.”

We tend to view the arrival of the new year as a time to assess life. It’s a “you are here” moment, with time away from work to spend with friends and family. But so often, new year’s resolutions don’t stick. They lack real motivation.

What a contrast with a life-changing prognosis that summons you to reckon with your own mortality. It motivates the soul in ways the calendar never could.

Sasse reckons with mortality by explaining the reason we humans can have hope

“The hope of what’s to come (is) not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague Hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a boot-strapped hope in our own strength,” the senator said. “We hope in a real Deliverer – a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place.”

You don’t have to wait for a life-threatening near-miss or a cancer diagnosis to be motivated by your own mortality toward a life of hope. This is the point of David Gibson’s book “Living Life Backward,” his thoughts on the most enigmatic book in the Bible.

He writes, “Death can change us from people who want to control life for gain into people who find deep joy in receiving life as a gift. This is the main message of Ecclesiastes in a nutshell: Life in God’s world is gift, not gain.”

We chase things in life that turn out to be meaningless. “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind.” (Ecc. 1:14)

It’s talking about the futile focus on gaining assets you can’t take with you or building a reputation people forget when you’re gone. When life takes a turn, you realize just how meaningless it is to strive for safe, new, exciting or predictable. Just ask Ben Sasse.

Neither the world nor your life is within your control. You can’t know what will happen, but you can trust a rescuing God at work on your behalf. Good things await. “He has set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.” (Ecc. 3:11)

Sasse says he is now “marching to the beat of a faster drummer.” He chooses to live in the clarifying light of an inevitability we all face. To accept physical life as a temporary gift is to contemplate what is beyond the inevitable. It is here you find your hope:

“To live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:21)