I’m hearing the term “bucket list” a lot more recently. It refers to goals we hope to accomplish before we die. I just knocked one off my list: to make a large pieced quilt. For years at fairs or quilt stores I’ve gazed with my jaw dropping at the intricate, colorful fabric art created for walls or beds. Yes, I’d made hundreds of baby quilts and a few full-size quilts, but they were of randomly-arranged five-inch squares. They were quick, colorful, and took care of my sewing scraps. But pieced, patterned quilts? I always considered those the realm of the infinitely careful and patient, which I am not.
I did survive putting together my pieced quilt (the log cabin pattern), but it’s not perfect. I had to rip out and re-do several sections that got way off. But it’s done--at least the 611 scraps that went into its 47 squares. Now I need to get it assembled and top-stitched.
I know of people who have amazing bucket lists. My sister’s mother-in-law was promised a glider ride for her 100th birthday. She wasn’t too healthy when Number Hundred came around, but got it in time for her 101st birthday. But I also know of many whose “bucket list” is simply to live longer. A special friend has gone through a year of grueling cancer treatments. Her hope goes up and down with the blood tests that reveal “cancer markers,” and the other day with the markers “up,” she was emotionally down. I can understand that. She has always taken care of her health and exercised, but still those malevolent marauders planted themselves in her body and don’t want to leave.
Sometimes we live under the shadow of genetic predispositions to life-threatening disease. My dad had his first heart attack in his forties, and died of either his fourth or fifth when he was only 63. Guess what: I’m under treatment for high cholesterol. My mother died of complications from breast cancer at 59. Guess what: that’s the part of my anatomy checked the most. And while I don’t enjoy those yearly tests that turn a cup into a saucer, I know they’re my best defense for early detection.
I’ve been thinking recently of a relative through marriage who just lost her mother at age 66. Barely half a year earlier, a stroke robbed the mom of her mobility and go-for-it personality. The tendency to strokes runs in the family. Thus, there’s always the question: will my time come? And when? Strokes (or heart attacks or even cancer) make no appointment to happen. They strike whether or not you’ve checked off all the items on your bucket list. At the mom’s memorial, much was said of how she invested in young women and in her grandchildren. Whether or not she intended that as her “bucket list,” it was worthy—and she did her best in the time allotted to her.
When a friend of mine died in her fifties of cancer after living half her life as a quadriplegic after an auto accident, I asked God some hard questions about her suffering and short life. I recalled how, despite her disability and illnesses, she glowed with faith and trust in God. You couldn’t hang on to your gloomies when you got around her.
I started to get my answer when I did a study of Psalms 90. Psalm 90 is Moses’ lament about the brevity of life. It’s really a downer. Basically it says, “Life is tough, then you die, probably at 70.” He does put out an appeal for joy and gladness “for as many years as we have seen trouble” (v. 15) and then he makes what I’d call a desire for completed bucket lists: “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us: establish the work of our hands for us—yes, establish the work of our hands.” Beside this verse in my Bible I had written “9-11-98, Help me make a lasting difference!” Eleven months earlier, at the age of 50, I was almost killed by a drinking driver. A split-second veer to the ditch meant our car was totaled but we lived. Talk about being very aware that God has given you extra time!
More than twelve years have passed since I marked that comment in my Bible. Twelve years of daily hands-on stuff like grocery shopping, meal prep, housecleaning, care-giving elderly parents, raising teens to young adulthood, encouraging and helping folks, pounding out articles on my computer, praying, seeking to do the ministries God put before me. Was this how God established “the work of my hands”?
Yes, there are a few things I might like to do and see on this incredible earth before death comes (although that will graduate me to the new realm of Heaven). In the decades of care-giving parents in their final decline, then tight finances as we put kids through college, we put a lot of things “on hold.”
So what is my bucket list, now that the quilt top is pieced? Although it sounds trite, it’s just to love Jesus more and more. Maybe, when our kids start their families, to help nurture a grandchild. (One of my sorrows is that my mother died before I was married, so she never knew her grandchildren through me.) The next Psalm, 91, speaks of God’s protection and ends this way: “With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation.” “Long life” it literally “length of days.” I think what it means is this: in the measure of our days that God already knows about, we will be satisfied when we keep our focus on our salvation, who is Jesus Christ.
No matter what we may write on our “bucket lists,” this is what’s most important: Jesus first, people next.
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