October 30, 2009
The Good Life
Today we will have the funeral service for my sister Shelly. A couple months ago the radiation doctor told Shelly that there was no cure for the cancer in her spinal column. When the doctor left the room Shelly said, “It’s OK. I’ve lived a good life.” Shelly thought she lived a good life because she in fact did everything she wanted to do. It’s certainly a matter of perspective. I too think that I’ve lived a good life…but it’s because I haven’t done everything I wanted to do.
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Gail;
-----That’s interesting. I see two ways I can understand having lived a good life because you’ve not done everything you wanted to do. I concluded early in my life that emotional desires did not necessarily proceed from the seat of intelligence. They were creatures of habit calling for more of the same experience the mind had been accustomed to feeding upon. So when they serve up the occasional desire for things outside the bounds of goodness, the good life will have been not doing those wrong things you wanted to do. On the other hand, as Paul expressed, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I can not do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” The good life is the life we all hope for, that life of fellowship with God and His children wherein there is no wrong done. Yet living in this life generously sprinkled with wrong, the only way we can now live the good life is through desiring and attempting to live it while confessing our failure to actually live it as we want to do, so He can clean away the wrong by His forgiveness. From Him, then, we receive the good life we live.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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