I haven't written very much about my mother-in-law's brain cancer diagnosis last year, or the subsequent seven months of treatments, surgeries, losses and goodbyes.
Seven months - she was given less time to live than it took her to grow in her mother's womb.
Isn't that how it so often goes? We take the living for granted, assume the days will be many and long. I'm guilty as anyone else. I wake, eat, work, complain, cook, clean, eat, watch tv, sleep, repeat, Again. Again. Again. Until the cycle seems eternal itself. And its exhausting.
But you don't know the worth of life, the clinging to breath, till its already slipping through your fingers and there is only an inch left.
And what will you do with your inch?
"I just want you all to have a happy life, to love each other." She said from her wheelchair, just a few weeks before she passed away. Love each other.
In the last days, the last centimeters left to her, she found what mattered above all; my mother-in-law who had suffered so grievously - who had lost memory, and language and even personality - did not lose this: that the core of life is LOVE.
Not success, or pleasure, or even more time... she saw that to have a happy life, a well-lived life, requires only this - to love well.
And that my friends, she did in spades.
You can't take it with you, or so the phrase goes. But here's the thing... its not what you take, its what you leave that matters.
My mother-in-law, one of the godliest women I know, is now more alive than ever before. She has moved forward into the resurrection, into the kingdom of heaven, where there is a vast treasure collected from her acts of love. For what is enduring in value in the ethereal is similarly valuable in the temporal:
Acts of love reverberate in echos that go on forever.
The only thing that will matter at the end of your days, whether here or in heaven, is this:
“And he [Jesus] said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” ”
Not healing, not prosperity, not ease, or jobs, or vacations, or six pack abs, or getting pregnant, or marriage, or model homes, or money, or appearance, or acclaim. None of it will matter when your final inch comes along. None of it will matter when the inch is gone. But how you loved... that will be valuable, be impactful, forever.
“ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.”