Dear God, you know that I love the TV show Ted Lasso. I don’t know if you approve of me loving it so much, but I think you do. It’s quite remarkable. I still stick to my thinking that Ted is unique because, while professing no faith or discipleship in you, he exhibits the fruits of your Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And that fruit seems to spread to the other characters. I think people are attracted to the show because it is attracted to the fruit of you. I wish Christians were better at walking the narrow path with you and exhibiting your fruit because we simply aren’t capable of it on our own. Ted is written by writers. And the writers know what we should look like. It’s just so hard to live it.

So why this Mary Oliver poem above? Because it was the voiceover in the last episode of season 4, and I wanted to read it and spend a little time with it. Death, after all, is inevitable and an incredible mystery to all of us. Some people are so obsessed by it, even Christians, that they dedicate their earthly lives on this side of death trying to asuage their fear by understanding it. But we simply cannot know. We get hints of an afterlife. My grandmother, on her death bed, said she saw dead relatives waiting for her. I’ve heard a lot of similar stories. I know some have died for a few minutes and come back to describe different experiences. We’ll see. In the meantime, we are left with poetry and this earthly life you’ve given each of us. Some with more pain than others. Some of that pain comes because of mistakes we made and some comes by random misfortune. I’m thinking of the couple I know of that just lost a three-month-old baby in the middle of the night. Tragic doesn’t begin to describe their earthly life experience. Father, help and comfort them, please.

Parts of this poem that stand out to me:

• The four images of death at the beginning (bear, grim reaper of sorts with money to purchase a life, measle pox, and an iceberg) are all scary things.
• Oliver’s response to the idea of them is to choose to respond with curiosity and wonder. They are, after all, going to do what they want to do with us. We are along for the ride. Why not greet it as something new and exciting. Of course, as a Christian I am positive and hopeful about an eternal afterlife with you in which I won’t experience time but your kingdom instead.
• Deciding to greet death with curiosity and wonder now allows us to put the current life in perspective. The people around me are really just like me. They are 1 8-billionth of the earth’s current population, just like me. They are worried about getting their Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs met, just like me.
• Then, she has a goal at the end to be able to say that she chose amazement, loved the world, and to have not measured her existence by success. The doesn’t want to look back having given in to fear.
• She wants to feel she lived in this world, and not simply visite it.

It’s only this last point where I diverge from her. Well, the last two I guess. If I were to rewrite the last two stanzas, I would definitely have surrendering my rights to my life to you in there. To have spent this life worshipping you. Loving you. Loving others. It is so short, after all. It is a blip in eternity. Since I don’t have writers dictating my words, actions, and emotions, the only way I will ever experience the fruit of your Spirit is by attaching my branch to your vine as best I can.

Father, you know what’s going on in my life right now. You know my levels of stress and fatigue. You know who the people are about whom I am concerned. You know the problems I’m trying to solve. You know how much I love the people close to me–even those who are currently physically and even emotionally so far away. Guide me today. Guide them. Holy Spirit, fill me and comfort me. Love through me. Be glorified in me. Help me to use this one day of this earthly life you’ve given me just how you want me to use it.

I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,

Amen