CHAPTER 46
LIFE’S GOOD
Recently, I strolled into a hospital for a “faith at work” session. I had being in an hospital ward some time ago and it was not the best experience having a family in the ward. I had firsthand experience what life in a hospital bed really is.
As I moved from bed to bed during this session, I observed something. All the patients had a desire to hold on to life. On each bed, I found a Bible and even when the owners were incapable of reading them, they seem to find solace having the bible beside their pillows. The Bible for them was some spiritual succor they could hang on to in the face of their life threatening ailments.
No one wants to die. Everyone wants to hang on to life much longer. However bad the state of a person’s life, he still thinks there is hope around that some more breathe in life can offer. The fear of death lies in the uncertainty that clouds our knowledge of what life after life on earth will look like.
I remember listening to the conversation between a woman and her daughter. This woman was advance in age and possibly reaching the close of life. She was not having the best life either for a woman her age. While she discussed with her daughter, she had disclosed to her how she had managed to escape an accident. Her daughter laughed as she narrated the incident and asked whether she was no going to die. The woman rejected the question and informed her daughter that she was not going to die as life is too sweet.
While I listened to that woman’s conversation with her daughter, I smiled. The woman shares the same attribute with a majority of earth’s occupants. We will not die because life’s good.
What characterizes the good life? It’s thought provoking a question. Finding an answer to this question could be difficult because I have come to discover that it’s only in death that everyone (rich and poor) agrees that life is good.
The poor think the wealthy class is living the good life and they strive to find their way to this class. The wealthy class feels they are living the good life and are very much comfortable. The consensus is that one has to be wealthy to have a good life. That’s some bad conclusion that is dismissed on grounds of wrong premise.
When one finds himself in between the life here and that after, he dismisses any allusions he may have had about how life has treated him even if he was a miserly poor person. He learns to find contentment and wishes just for one chance to prove he could be contented. To him, life’s good once he is alive.
To define the good life could be some challenge especially because each person’s experiences vary. However, the congruent definition of the good life is the God life.
God creates us each for purposeful living. The good life is achieved when we attain the state of purposefulness. This is a state when our minds come at peace with God and we reach contentment mountain even when we lack the basest of life’s amenities.
What this means is that one could be poor yet live the good life and one may have the whole world and still live an unachieved life.
While wealth may provide us some convenience, it does not provide all. It may bring us physical satisfaction but we fall short of the inner peace in our heart that characterizes the good life.
When we have inner peace, our wealth becomes a plus, an extra. Our physical properties though may not count so much because our source of joy is not derived from them. Rather, we attain this joy from the flow of God’s goodly inspiration.
Enjoying the good life has been debacle by man’s desire to seek first the physical moth ridden treasures of our world and last, the super-rich Godly treasures thus losing our sense of purposeful life. Thus at the hospital bed, man finally accepts that he had wrongly pursued the wrong treasures of this world and seeks to pursue God’s treasures if the opportunity presents itself.
If you do want the good life and desire the opportunity to brag about how good life is, you can find that satisfaction in attaining the God life.
Let God be the inspiration of your life and accept his purpose fully. The next song you will be singing will be “Life’s good.”