Love Notes

by Bill Love

I was recently preparing a funeral meditation for an 87-year-old woman who had been killed in an automobile accident, a life full of years, yet tragically cut shorter than need be.

I thought about my own life and, before long, was thinking about the limits of life to which death bears witness. Life is limits. We even see that in Creation when God set boundaries on light and dark, water and dry land. Water without limits is chaos. It is when water finds its limits that it becomes a sea or a river. And it does not find its depth until it finds its banks, its limits.

When I was growing up, I wanted to pitch like Sandy Koufax, but I was not lefthanded, and play basketball like Elgin Baylor, but I was not 6’5”, and write poetry like Shakespeare, and sing like Sam Cooke. As I grew older, my models changed. I’d like to write like Guy Clark and sing like Jerry Jeff Walker. I eventually realized I cannot do all those things or even any of those things.

I was always frustrated when I got career counseling in high school and early in my ministry. I was told that I could do anything I wanted. Too many options are too many. Each choice would limit the options. I have come to believe that is a good thing. I cannot grieve the roads not taken. I cannot grieve the roads taken by choice or default to which I have not given myself fully.

Last Sunday, I visited and took communion to a member who is facing his fifth open-heart surgery. This time for a valve replacement, the result of endocarditis. He has so much scar tissue from the previous operations that they cannot go in from the front. As we were talking, he said that, when you confront your own death, it changes your perspective on your life. He said, “You lose your appetite for riff-raff; you don’t have time for junk.”

A couple of years ago, I was told I had cancer. I realized immediately that I no longer had the luxury of living wanting to be someone else. Not even those more personal models like my father. I could not be anyone else. I could only be Bill Love.

When I got the diagnosis, I knew immediately the regrets I had about my life and what I wanted to do with the life I have left. I am less willing to be diverted from living my life, either by well-intentioned people or by my own anxiety. I have said, “You have not lived until you’ve been told you’ve got cancer.”

I was taught to be concerned with what others would think and how it would appear to others. Practically, that means reshaping the truth to be acceptable, polite, and not to hurt anyone’s feelings, which makes the truth something other than true. And the gospel tells me that the truth makes me free. It means living life from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.

My life is the only one I have to live. And I am the only one who can live it. I no longer have the luxury to waste any of it. I am at an awkward age between being too old for “he died so young” and too young for “he lived a full life.”

Gratefully, following surgery, I am free of cancer. I will do what I can to stay that way, to promote health and not cooperate with cancer. I am grateful for what it taught me, for the value of what I have (not grieving places I will not see, poetry I will not write, trophies I will not win). And whenever death comes, I am going to do what I can to live a full life, a life rich in all the measures that really matter.

Bill Love is interim senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Grand Haven, Michigan.