Dear God, I have a friend who is dying. While I sat watching him lie in bed yesterday and then listened to people talk about him in the times when I wasn’t in the room with him, I started to kind of put some things together.

First, earlier in the day, he wasn’t ready. He was scared. He was fighting the oncoming death. He’s been on hospice for weeks. He’s been terminally ill for years. But he wasn’t ready. He didn’t want any medications to ease his pain or anxiety. Yeah. He wasn’t ready. Then, and for his privacy’s sake I won’t go into too much detail, but about the middle of the day he was tired. He was ready.

So what was he ready for? Well, as I sit and think about myself and what I hold onto in life, I think there might be a few things.

• Ready to stop participating in the world and its history.
• Ready to stop contributing to the lives around me.
• Ready to accept that I’ve done all I will do and the world will now go on without me, perhaps forgetting me completely.
• Ready to say goodbye.

So how does that relate to the title I gave this prayer? Well, when one mom was talking about this friend’s influence on her children, she said he always instilled in them that they could do anything they wanted to do, but it would take hard work. When I heard this, I started to put some things together–even in my own heart. For so many of us, this is how we approach life. We have things to accomplish. We have things we want to achieve. We have power to attain, influence to acquire, and admiration to earn. Ultimately, we want to be able to stack up our life against someone else’s and hope we compare favorably. And I use all of this broadly and from a worldly perspective because these are the things the world calls us to do.

But what if we take the philosophy of doing anything we want in life and bring it under your authority? When we get to the end of the road, what is it that you would like us to stack up for comparison?

• We we able to be humble, admit our faults/weaknesses, and share them with others?
• Did we pursue relationship with you and become more Christlike in the process? In other words, were we Jesus followers, and not just Jesus believers?
• Were we in close enough relationship with you that we knew to stop and listen for your still, small voice to call us to action?
• Did we love richly and give your mercy to others?
• Did we bring others the hope and peace of relationship with you?

Out of the 350 million Americans, or 6+ billion people in the world, the odds are long that my life will be remembered more than a few years beyond my death. Few people achieve the notoriety of leaving a mark on the world like presidents of the United States, great captains of industry like Steve Jobs, etc. No, my life will be smaller than theirs. But that’s okay.

Father, what I want in life is to be found faithful. I want to be open-minded to the idea that I don’t know as much as I think I know–about the world, or myself. I want to be willing to do what I think is right even though it might cost me the love of someone I love, even if what I’m doing is for their good. I want to have touched lives in a way that plays throughout history, and it’s okay if I do this anonymously. It’s okay if my name is lost to history. I know it is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. That’s all I need.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen