It’s your call …

It seemed as if all the blood drained from the face of one of my older sisters, immediately turning her complexion a paste white. Her mouth fell open as her right hand flew upward and clutched at her heart while her left hand pushed the phone from her ear. For a few seconds she couldn’t breathe or speak.

“Tammy, Scotty … Mom died today,” was all my sister was able to finally muster as she stood there in complete astonishment. My other sister and I took the words as if someone hit us with a brick.

It was a telephone call that would change my life profoundly.

I’ve had some significant phone calls since then but perhaps none as personally impacting as that one when, as a young teenager, I learned about the sudden and unexpected death of my mother.

We tend to expect life to flow and make changes a little easier than that. But the truth is, we live just a telephone call away from radical change. With just a phone call, we can find ourselves facing losses and pain that a moment before seemed unimaginable. With just a phone call, we could face opportunity greater than we had ever hoped for. With just a phone call, we could lose all opportunity on which we were placing our hopes.

We do not know what the next phone call will be, yet we live without any consideration that all we have is this moment. Not only is there no guarantee for tomorrow, there’s no promise we’ll see the end of this day.

James speaks to this issue in James 4:13-16, “Look here, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.’ How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog — it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, ‘If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.’ Otherwise you are boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil.”

It is wise to make reasonable plans for future possibilities, yet instead of doing that we often get ahead of ourselves. Instead of being prudent about potential, we run away with our own dreams and desires, turning them into expectations that we structure our lives around. That often leads us to the next point James makes in the very next verse of chapter four:

“Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it” (James 4:17).

The possibility of a tragic call is greatly reduced when we live fully in the moment, doing what we know God would have us do now, with appropriate planning and action toward what is our best understanding of what God may bring to us as a future. But when we spend our days with our heads and hearts in an unpromised future, missing out on what we should be doing today, we can anticipate greater troubles in our lives.

Life will bring challenges, complete with phone calls we don’t want but have no control over. But we don’t have to compound our difficulties by living in daydreams rather than living out life.

Are you ready for the next call that could come your way? Or are you missing what God has for you now as you chase desires for a tomorrow that may never come?

Scotty