Good Mourning

There’s a series going on at church called 40 Days to Live. It’s supposed to correspond with Lent, hence the 40 days. I mean, usually when people are diagnosed with terminal illnesses, they get at least a couple months to live. I suppose our church is doing the condensed version. I’m kidding.

Either way, 40 days or 40 years, it’s begun to really sink in that my days are numbered (see Psalm 90:12). I was at work the other day, listening to Pandora (as always), when an old Talib Kweli song came on: Good Mourning. Isn’t it funny how we can own so much music and so many CD’s, yet when a song we own comes on the radio, it’s like we’re hearing it for the first time? Well, if you can’t relate, this happens to me all the time. Especially with CD’s that I haven’t listened to recently (in this case, Reflection Eternal). The chorus for Good Mourning is as follows:

“Good mourning, good afternoon, good night
What have you done with your life?
Everybody’s time comes to be embraced by the light
You only scared to die when you ain't livin right”

After this, Hi-Tek (Talib’s partner in crime and DJ), scratches the record to allow a line from the sampled beat to resound: “Stay awake to the ways of the world.”

As I listened to the second verse which, believe me, is even more powerful than the chorus, I started thinking about if I had 40 days left on this earth. I spoke with my priest the other day about this concept. I keep reading and hearing that we have to live life as if we had 40 days on earth. And every time I consider this, I think: “That’s easy. I’d quit my job and live in a monastery until I died.” I told my priest, “How am I supposed to live like I have 40 days left if I can’t quit my job and I can’t move to a monastery?” He told me that if I needed to be in a monastery for my remaining days on this earth, then I’m not living the way I should be. My daily life should be just as holy as it would be if I spent it in a monastery. We have to get rid of this concept of waiting to get serious with God until we feel ready.

I grew up being taught not to waste anything. This pertained to food, to shampoo, to batteries. No matter what it was, we had to eat or use every last bit of whatever it was, even if we hated it; because waste was the worst sin in the world. I’m still like this. I have a bottle of shampoo in my shower right now, and I hate it. I noticed it was running low, so I went out and bought new, lovely smelling shampoo. I spent about a good 20 minutes in CVS picking it out. The thing is, I haven’t finished the other bottle yet…so I refuse to throw it away and use my wonderfully fragrant new shampoo. Before you call me crazy, how many times do we do this with our life? We know that whatever we have right now is crappy, whatever life we’re living right now is sub-par. At the same time, we have a wonderfully attractive life waiting on our bathroom shelf. It’s there, ready for use. But we’re too stubborn to throw out our old life. So we hold on to it for as long as possible…until we run out. The only discrepancy in my analogy is that when I run out of my shampoo, I can just grab the new bottle that I have waiting. But with life, when we run out, that’s it. We can’t grab that new life that was waiting for us, patiently on the shelf, collecting dust. How sad is that thought?

This is what drives me these days: how sad it would be if I told myself I had time to get things right, and then didn’t actually have that time. We can’t say no one warned us. We can only blame ourselves for holding on to something so worthless.

Good Mourning, Talib Kweli