Five Reasons to Have an Expiration Date
My first husband, Gary, lived with an expiration date. He was diagnosed with late-stage disease that had metastasized. The experts gave him two years because he was relatively young and in good shape and because prostate cancer is slow growing. But he blew way past two years.
Photo by Kevin Andre on Unsplash
Author Richard Paul Evans ponders on how we might live if we knew what day we would die:
“It could be tattooed on our foreheads like the expiration date on a milk bottle. ... Maybe we’d stop wasting our lives worrying about things that never happen, or collecting things that we can’t take with us. We’d probably treat people better. We certainly wouldn’t be screaming at someone who had a day left. Maybe people would finally stop living like they’re immortal. Maybe we would finally learn how to live.”
Borrowing from the above quote, here are 5 reasons for having an expiration date:
Maybe we’d stop wasting our lives worrying. I like to think of myself as a non-worrier, but I’m guilty of wasting time and energy back then, worrying about how I would survive widowhood on our strained finances, waking at 3:00 most mornings with a stomach knotted into anxiety. But life unfolded so much better than I had imagined. Which means I wasted time and energy and stomach knots and 3:00am awakenings.
We might stop collecting stuff we can’t take with us. In widowhood, I pared down. All my earthly possessions fit in a 10-ft cargo trailer and the back of my little SUV. For six years, I didn’t have access to my stuff … and I did quite well without it. Sure, I missed my dressy winter coat, and from time to time, I missed my Crockpot, but I discovered I really don’t need so much stuff.
We’d probably treat people better. Gary and I treated each other well—some days better than others, as marriage goes. But his expiration date enhanced our relationship. I grew kinder, more patient, more empathetic. But why couldn’t I have been those things before the cancer diagnosis?
Maybe we’d stop living like we’re immortal. Most of us spend the earlier years of our lives and marriage and careers working and saving toward someday. Which we should do. But we need to balance that with living in the present. Maybe we shouldn’t assume we have forever to enjoy the fruits of our labors. Someday is now.
Hopefully we’d finally learn how to live. With an expiration date hanging over our heads, Gary and I found a balance between being wise and frugal with our finances vs. making memories and creating more fun and adventure. Because of cancer, life’s simple pleasures were so much more heightened—road trips, eating ice cream, hiking through wildflowers, watching snow fall, sitting beside the river under impossibly tall trees with dinner and a camera.
Fast forward
When I was first widowed and packing up to leave this town that I loved to live in a country called southern California, I couldn’t have imagined what my life would look like today.
After a year, unusual circumstances brought me back to Bend—nothing coincidental, but a divine appointment. I love how things unfolded, how I met Dan while interviewing him for a story about the shower truck, how he asked me to marry him, how Foundry has accepted and included me.
There’s a passage in Ecclesiastes 5 that pertains to those cancer-caregiving and widow years. Here’s how it sounds in The Message:
“Yes, we should make the most of what God gives, both the bounty and the capacity to enjoy it, accepting what’s given and delighting in the work. It’s God’s gift! God deals out joy in the present, the now. It’s useless to brood over how long we might live.” – vv. 19-20
And isn’t that the point? Even when we’re in a hard place, even when the thin light at the end of the dark tunnel grows dimmer from time to time, we can make the most of what God has entrusted to us. We can live in the present and delight in the work God has given us to do.
We can probably think of a dozen reasons why it’s a good thing our expiration dates aren’t tattooed on our foreheads.
At the same time, maybe we could think of a dozen ways to live deeply content and grateful in the present.
