I love Sundays!  It’s one of my favorite days of the week.  Our Sundays usually begin early as we prepare for a full day of worship here in our local church.  We have two services each weekend so there’s a lot of prep work that goes into those worship experiences, both throughout the week and day of.  Our normal routine usually consists of lunch together as a family after our morning service.  We then return home to rest up for our second service.  This past Sunday, January 26, Christy and I had just settled down for a nap and I received a notification on my phone with news that I didn’t want to hear and could not believe.

I love Sundays.  But not this one.

I still remember Kobe’s rookie season.  It was the year I met my wife.  He was 18…we were 16…and it was amazing to watch someone so close to our age begin to take the NBA by storm.  It was just as fun to watch him collect 5 NBA Championships, 2 NBA Finals MVP Awards, 18 trips to the NBA All-Star Game, 4 of which awarded him MVP and a Slam Dunk Contest Champion status for good measure.  To say that we were saddened to hear of the helicopter crash that took his life, his daughter Gianna’s life, and seven others, is an understatement.

Over the last few days, there’s been a cloud of sadness hovering over our hearts.  We are saddened by the fear those on board must have felt.  We are saddened by the devastation their loved ones now feel as they attempt to move forward without them.  We are saddened by the prospect of what would have been had these nine individuals not been taken so suddenly and so tragically.  We are saddened by the reality of our own mortality.  Life is unfair and uncertain.  Bad things do happen to good people and it doesn’t seem right.  When tragedy strikes, there’s a feeling of inadequacy as we ponder how helpless we are.  If only we could change the diagnosis…reverse the process of death…prevent the car crash…or helicopter crash.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers when it comes to why tragedy occurs or who it affects and the uncertainty is unending.  It’s true that no one is promised tomorrow.  Solomon, considered to be the wisest man who ever lived, said in Proverbs 27:1, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth”.  Good advice…not very comforting.

If we’re not careful, life’s uncertainty can shut us down.  It’s very easy to find ourselves in a defensive stance, raising every wall imaginable, in hopes of shielding and protecting ourselves and our loved ones from any form of destruction.  But that’s not how God called us to live.  Instead, the Word of God teaches us to build our lives on the foundation of hope and faith in God.  While this strategy for life doesn’t exempt us from hard times, it does position us to navigate the difficulties of this life with a hope and a strength many simply do not know.

We must make a conscious decision to make the most of every day.  That decision will give us purpose.  It will bring us perspective.  It will eliminate the unnecessary.  When tragedies like this take place, it should recalibrate our focus in life.  Our desire should be to honor God with our lives every day, all the while making the most of every opportunity to love those in our lives and tell them so.  But this seems to be a struggle.  Life has a way of bogging us down in worries, frustrations, pride and strife, sometimes to the point of forgetting how blessed we are.  We foolishly get caught up in a web of attempts to prove ourselves right.  We boast of superior knowledge, more experience, higher accomplishments and greater possessions.  But none of that matters because when life is over, it’s over and the time we have with the ones we love can never be regained on this earth again.

No one cares if you’re right, and allowing relationships to be destroyed in the process of trying to prove it, is wrong.  That’s ironic.  You can stay at the nicest hotels, drive the most elaborate vehicles, live in the finest houses, take the nicest vacations, have the most envied job and pad your bank account with all the finances you can collect, whether ethically or unethically, but there will come a day when those things won’t matter anymore.  You can’t take it with you.  The simple truth of the matter is that when we care more about ourselves, our possessions, our pride and our pursuits than the people in our lives, we’ve started down a wrong road.

Pride and misguided passion has caused many a relationship to go south.  Sometimes, it’s best not to share our opinion.  As much as it devastates us, people aren’t nearly as interested in our opinions as we think they should be.  Relationships are more important than being right.  People are more important than our pride.  Peace is more important than our ego.  We shouldn’t attempt to answer questions we weren’t asked.  The answers that we attempt to provide for people’s problems aren’t nearly as important as our presence in the midst of their problems.  People usually don’t want our advice.  They just want relationship…friendship.  There are lifetime principles that will never change…how you treat people matters.

Christy and I have been amazingly blessed in our lives.  We are healthy and happy.  We have two children that are healthy and happy.  We have a dog that we all love unashamedly.  We have family.  We have friends.  We have dependable vehicles, a beautiful home, daily fulfillment as we pursue our callings in life as a pastor and an educator and a little money in the bank.  We’ve met some of the most remarkable people in the world, from sports celebrities that perform on television daily for years to church members most people in this world have never heard of, even though they’re responsible for making a massive difference in the local church for a community and an eternal impact for the kingdom of God.  We’ve met great pastors who have become family.  We’ve cruised to Mexico, swam with dolphins in the Bahamas, seen more concerts than we’ll ever remember and spent countless vacations with a mouse named Mickey.

We are blessed.  But my prayer is that we never allow our blessings or our pursuit of them to cause us to be the type of people who see other people as expendable…insignificant…unimportant.  I can honestly say that Christy and I both feel the same level of passion when it comes to people.  We both desire to be a true friend.  We want people to know that they can call on us if they need us or they simply want to talk.  We want people to feel comfortable in our home.  We want people to feel comfortable around us.  We want people to know they are loved by us.  We strive to always remember that people are the most important investment in life we can make.

We also repeatedly remind ourselves to keep the main thing the main thing here in our home…our desire is not simply to love each other but love each other well.  With no promise of tomorrow, my goal today is to be the best husband and dad I can be.  We can’t control the future but we can control the passion with which we enjoy the time we have together.  We experience life much like everyone else.  Married couples argue from time to time.  They disagree.  But I’m thankful for the love that God gave Christy and myself.  It lasts.  It endures.  That is something to be thankful for.  Raising two kids, ages 14 and 11, is not always easy.  We’re learning as we go.  Sometimes we butt heads with them.  Part of the process I guess but those two kids are our favorite two kids in the world.  We’d rather be with them on a Friday night than anyone else.  And that is something to be thankful for.

Speaking of Friday night, we’ll sit down together later tonight and watch the first Laker game since Kobe’s passing.  I’m sure we’ll shed a few tears and offer a few prayers for the Bryant family and the families of the other victims.  We’ll be thankful that we have each other and make a few more memories.

This Sunday night, we’ll watch the Super Bowl together.  We’ll eat.  The commercials will cause us to laugh until we cry.  We’ll spend time together and I’ll be reminded again why I love Sundays.