ONE MONTH TO LIVE - WRAP-UP

Today was the wrap-up of our six weeks of ONE MONTH TO LIVE. It was a great run. Over 800 of our people got themselves into small groups. Way to go! And kudos to our Life Development Director, Lisa K., for her passion and vision and direction to get us all there.

The four pillars of ONE MONTH TO LIVE have been:

live passionately

love completely

learn humbly

leave boldly

In the movie ‘SECONDHAND LIONS,’ two old curmudgeons, Hub and Garth, played by Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, assume the care of Hub’s 10-year old nephew, Walter, played by Joel Haley Osment, after his mother abandons him. The two men are at first reluctant hosts and Uncle Hub begrudges Walter the little food he eats and the small space he takes up. The two old men live in a dilapidated farmhouse and spend most days sitting on their old porch, shotguns straddling their laps, nursing giant grudges against the world and taking potshots with their guns at any traveling salesmen foolhardy enough to venture near. They want to be left alone to die quietly in their misery. In their own words: “THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT NOTHIN.’”

But the boy’s presence works a miracle. Their withered hearts slowly grow young again, learning to love once more. They start to hunger for more. They begin to spend their enormous fortune. Apparently they possess a mysterious cache of money hidden somewhere on their land – and they end up spending it on everything from garden seeds and tools to a catapult that flings plates skyward for shooting practice – to a Red-baron style airplane and a secondhand lion – a mangy old feline who just wants, like they did, to finish her days in undisturbed silence.

As the old men’s hearts wake up, they tell Walter their story, bit by bit. Uncle Hub was once a swashbuckling adventurer, and Garth his trusted sidekick. Together, they live an enchanted, dangerous life, routing armies, plundering treasures, rescuing damsels in distress. Together, they outwitted a cunning enemy, an Arabian sheik, Uncle Hub’s rival, for the love of his life – beautiful Jasmine.

Walter is never sure whether to believe these stories. He wants to, but they’re so exotic and these arthritic cranky old men bear little resemblance to the legendary heroes they describe in their stories.

The two old men, in their closing days, become every bit as outrageous as they claimed to have been in their youth. They finish well. They die in their nineties, full of days, joyriding their plane with such reckless abandon they crash it upside down into the barn door.

Walter, now grown, comes to survey the scene of their death. As he stands outside the house, a helicopter rises overhead and lands nearby. A handsome young man, around his age, steps out. He is dark-skinned and Middle Eastern. Walter realizes it is the grandson of the legendary Arabian sheik, Hub’s rival. Both men grew up hearing fantastic stories of sword fights and narrow escapes and buried treasures and both wondered if they could be true. The sheik’s son looks at everything – the farm, the barn, the hole where the plane hit.

‘So,” he says, astonished – ‘It’s true after all. They really lived.’

Walter smiles. ‘Yes … they REALLY lived.’

And THAT’S my hope and prayer for all of us as we continue beyond the ONE MONTH TO LIVE series. May we live lives worthy of our calling – not hoarding – not living begrudgingly – but gladly spending and being spent for the Kingdom, making every moment count every day of our lives - so that when we’re gone and the dash is finished. our epitaph will be, “THOSE CRAZY FOLKS OVER THERE AT KFA --- THEY REALLY LIVED."

And be blessed.