A Terrible Reminder to Find Treasure in the Routine

This morning as I was leaving the fitness center I saw a man dropping off his wife for a class. She was wrestling with gym bags and coffee and seemed as if she were running slightly late for a class. But before she closed the car door, she stopped for a minute, looked at him, and said, “I love you.” Now maybe this is a part of their routine. I hope it is. But I suspect that a lot of people today took an extra second or two to let loved ones know that they were indeed loved. Even as I am writing this the tributes to Kobe Bryant are still being offered. Yesterday was one of those terrible days when a celebrity dies too young. This was even more tragic as his daughter died with him as well as several members of another family.

I can’t say that I was a Kobe Bryant fan. I have absolutely nothing against him; I just didn’t pay a lot of attention to him. I’m not much of a basketball fan, even less of an NBA fan. I know that he was a fantastic player and athlete. And now I know that off the court he was a positive influence on his community, loved his family, and made an impact on a great number of people. He was flawed like the rest of us, but he seems to have been someone who used the power of his celebrity for good.

The interesting thing that I notice in the wake of his death, and what I notice when others are taken in sudden or unusual ways, is that we are again reminded how very fragile our lives truly are and how many things we take for granted. That’s not necessarily something to feel guilty about. It’s very human of us to assume that daily life will continue pretty much as it always has. The ones we love will be there tonight and tomorrow and the next day. The drive to work will be routine. The traffic accident will happen to someone else. The annual physical will find nothing wrong. There may actually be some grace in that. If we walked around all the time contemplating what could go wrong or expecting tragedy, I doubt we could function normally or retain our sanity.

But the Psalmist encourages us to “remember that our days our numbered,” and that “our lives are but a few handbreadths.” An event like the one that took Kobe Bryant brings us up short because it’s a harsh reminder that tragedy can happen to anyone, famous or non-famous, at any time. We’re about four weeks from Ash Wednesday, but it’s not too early to think of the important message of that day: we are dust and to dust we shall return. Repent, and believe the gospel. We have immortal souls, but very mortal bodies.

Repentance in that context refers to our relationship to God, but it doesn’t have to be limited to that. Sometimes we need to repent of our habit of ignoring those we love. We need to repent of not appreciating and enjoying this wonderful gift of life we are given. We need to repent of being so concerned for the future that we miss the beauty of the present.

I don’t believe for a second that God orchestrated the death of Kobe Bryant or any other well-known person in order to teach us a lesson. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn a lesson through the pain and confusion of such a tragedy. God can redeem anything, including the tragic loss of a parent, spouse, child, friend, or sports idol. If we are able to say, “I love you” and truly mean it, if we can contact that friend or family member with whom we had an argument and haven’t talked to in years and restore relationship, if we can have our eyes opened to the incredible richness and blessings of our common, uneventful, and routine lives, then we can once more repent and believe the gospel – that the Kingdom of God has come near to us. We both give and receive a little bit of heaven on earth.