The skies were partly cloudy, the tempurature was 68 degrees, the wind was out of the west at 10 miles per hour. A beautiful day. At 8:45am, people working on the 103rd floor were pouring in their morning coffee, straightening their desks, reviewing their Tuesday appointments, bantering with office mates, glancing at the harbour...
One minute later none of that mattered. Twenty floors below, a 757 transected the building, leaving the 103rd cut off, trapped, hopeless. But not yet dead.
When you have ten minutes to live, what
are your thoughts? What is important in the last seconds? As a tribute to those
nameless faces staring down at us from the smokey inferno, can we stop what we
are doing long enough to listen to them? Seeing death from this perspective is
not morbid: on the contrary it can help us see life.
Those who found phones called - not
their stockbrokers to check the latest ticker, not their hairstylest to cancel
the afternoon's appointment, not even their insurance agents to check coverage
levels. They called their spouses to say 'I love you' one last time, children
to say 'You are precious', parents to say 'thank you' one last time. Through
tears they called best friends, neighbours, pastors and priests and rabbis. 'I
just want you to know what you mean to me'. And surely those standing on the
brink of another world thought of God - of truth and eternity, judgement and
redemption, grace and the gospel.Imminent death has a commanding power to straighten life's priorities with a jolt. At such dramatic moments, people suddenly realise that priorities matter.
Tragically, however, chronic overloading obscures this truth. How we live influences how we die, and misplaced busyness leads to terminal regrets. If we don't move to establish and then guard that which matters most, the breathless pace of daily overload will blind us to eternal priorities, until one day we too stand at such a window and look down. Perhaps with regret.
William Law said 'If you attempt to talk to a dying man about sports or business, he is no longer interested. He now sees other things as more important. People who are dying recognise what we often forget, that we are standing on the brink of another world.'
This video is incredible.
