Seven years ago this week (on September 10th) Eddie Torres started his new job with Canter Fitzgerald in New York City. The world was good...a new job and a wife seven months pregnant. Things were falling into place for Eddie. He died his second day on the job. He perished in the Twin Tower tragedies of September 11, 2001. His wife recently published a memoir of this experience entitled American Widow. Eddie was ready to tackle the world and had momentum by the throat working to his advantage! On that tragic day seven years ago he never came home. He went into eternity.

Those close to him will always remember him. He will not be forgotten by those who loved him. Reading a review of Eddie's wife's memoir I began to think about how life can turn on a dime. James, the half brother of Jesus, wrote, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." James 4:13-16. It is the right time of the year to read that verse about the vapor. Morning vapors with the cool air and the lowlands make for that moist morning fog that is so evident just for a few hours. Then, it's gone. That is life. "If the Lord wills, we shall live..." We shall live. That seems like such an assumed baseline that is somehow our birthright, yet the Bible urges us to reckon life as a precious gift from our Creator. "It is in Him that we live and move and have our very being...He gives life and breath to all things." Acts 17:25, 28.

We'll all die once and then live somewhere forever (Hebrews 9:27). When Eddie died and when we die, the thing that will matter most is what we have done with God's son Jesus Christ! In that Acts 17 speech that the apostle Paul gave to the sophisticated listeners at Athens, he directed their attention to the God of the universe who sustains our lives. Then he invited them to repent. "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead." Acts 17:31-32. That call was not new, Jesus began his ministry with a simple call with a familiar ring, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel." Mark 1:15

Repentance is not a super popular concept today. It is an affront to our perception of us. To a person we tend to all be "way ok"...until we honestly pull up next to God's standards. Then we take the equivalent of what is much more than a back seat to His standards. A back seat to God in eternity is a fate none of us want nor is it inevitable or even necessary. God made other plans for us. We're invited by grace to His party...one that will last forever.

The good news is that we can live with hope and when it comes...die with hope through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. God ran after us in Jesus and accomplished the errand of the cross and the assurance of his promise in the empty tomb. Now he invites us, while we live, to acknowledge our sin, turn around (repent) and give ourselves to Jesus Christ in faith. To know Him is have life eternal and celebrate that life before death (John 17:3). To not know Him is to perish in eternity.

Someday we'll leave the house for the last time. There is nothing in life quite like the assurance (because of his grace) of knowing that for we who have savingly laid a hold of Jesus, to absent our bodies is to enter the presence of our Lord. It is a win-win way to live and die....forgiven, hopeful and living with joy. Heaven is for everyone who can stand it and who has found joy in repentance and faith.

If tomorrow is your last day, are you ready to meet the One who gives you life and breath and the opportunity throughout your life to savingly come home to Him through repentance and faith? He stands at the door knocking, ready to meet you (Revelation 3:20). What a friend we have in Jesus, He who loved us and gave Himself for us so that we could live with hope and have everlasting life.