Quote

A friend sent me the book None Like Him, and I wanted to share this long quote from it:

     I was twenty-seven when I learned that my days were numbered. My insight came in the form of an unexpected phone call. Holding my six-month-old son, two months pregnant with my daughter, I listened uncomprehendingly as the doctor explained I had malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. They cut a section of skin, deep and wide, from the wall of my swelling abdomen.
     Once you hear a cancer diagnosis, you can't unhear it. Even with successful treatment, it changes the way you number your days. I had been given an opportunity not many twenty-seven-year-olds could claim: the opportunity to count each of my days as precious. Any illusions I might have had that this life would last forever were effectively removed. I learned a perspective that many don't grasp until the aging process begins its faithful instruction in universal human frailty. I didn't have to wait for crow's feet or hip replacement. My eternal Father taught me young to pursue the sacred calling to "live this day well."
     The experience marked me. Perhaps you can relate. Unlike my sister-in-law and the thousands of others of my generation who ink their credos into their flesh, I won't get a tattoo—not because I disapprove of them, but because I'm already sufficiently marked. I have a satin-slick scar which, if you were to see it, traces no apparent pattern. But to my eyes, more legible than any tattoo, it forms the words, "Tomorrow, if the Lord wills."
     We live differently when we regard the future as a place we will go "if the Lord wills." God does not owe me the seventy or eighty years of which Moses speaks in Psalm 90. Every year he gives is a gift, gracious and undeserved. Thanks be to God, not just for the years he has preserved me but for the years he has ordained for me, perfect in number and known only to him....
     Here is a remarkable truth: God is able to bring eternal results from our time-bound efforts. This is what Jesus intimates when he tells us to store up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. When we invest our time in what has eternal significance, we store up treasure in heaven. This side of heaven, the only investments with eternal significance are people. "Living this day well" means prioritizing relationships over material gain. We cannot take our stuff with us when we die, but, Lord willing, we may feed the hungry and clothe the needy in such a way that an eternal result is rendered. We may speak words that, by the favor of the Lord, transform into the very words of life. This is the calling of the missionary, the magnate, and the mother of small children: spend your time to impact people for eternity.
     Long after the beloved generations that debate tattoos around my table have gone to dust, long after your generation fades like grass, the God of all generations will endure. Thanks be to the God for whom "a thousand years are but as yesterday," the God who is from everlasting to everlasting. Thanks be to God for the limit of time, by which we are bound and he is not. Eternal God, establish the work of our hands.

From None Like Him, by Jen Wilkin. I don't know the page number, because I'm reading on Kindle.