Here today...gone tomorrow

If you were reading my blog about my purity ring, then you know I was looking through some of my journals yesterday. I was mostly looking at Easter over the past couple of years, but then I found today's date. Something very tragic happened on this date 3 years ago.

Helicopter | Apr 13 2006 5:35 PM

My day was going pretty well today until about a half an hour ago. A helicopter with two people that I knew crashed and the two men died. One of them was the chief of police and the other gave two of my friends and I a helicopter ride in October. It's really sad. My uncle was very good friends with both of them and he's really upset about it. I would really like to know what God has in store for us next. Although I'm not mad at God for this, I really would like to know why this happened.

This comes from my Battlecry blog. I'm taking a trip down memory lane tonight. Going all the way back to freshman year. Oh, such a good year, but towards the end, I had some issues and April was the month where my troubles started. But this wasn't one of the troubles.

Recently I heard about a youth pastor in Indiana who was in two of my friend's classes at Nazarene Bible College. He and his 9 year old son were killed when he fell asleep at the wheel and his truck went into a creek.

I didn't even know the guy, but this story really upsets me. Reading the story last night made me want to cry. When I was a freshman and just found out about this helicopter crash, I didn't cry, but as the years have passed, it seems to mean a lot more to me than it ever has. It's the same thing with 9/11. When that happened, I was in 5th grade and I guess it didn't understand it, but when we watched a tribute to it this year in government class I think it was, I wanted to cry. It really upset me.

That blog up there says that I got to ride in the same helicopter that crashed a few months before it had crashed. It could have been me in that helicopter and that will forever scare me. It could have been me or my friends, but it wasn't and somehow even though I feel like I shouldn't see it this way, but I'm really thankful for that.

Today it was really windy outside. It's just another reminder of how that helicopter crash happened. It was really windy that day back in 2006. It was a reason why those two men shouldn't have been in the helicopter.

Life is so precious. Sometimes we take life for granted. Sometimes we take people for granted.

What if you only had 30 days to live? How would you spend those 30 days? My neighbor and I were talking about this yesterday. I think the main idea I get out of this is that the way we would live those 30 days is the way we should live our entire life.

We should live like there's no tomorrow serving God and doing His will. And we don't need to worry about tomorrow because as the Bible says, tomorrow has its own worries.

Stop taking life for granted. Stop taking people for granted. You never know when people might leave. They may be here today, but gone tomorrow.