I don’t want to be overly morbid, but I’ve meaning to send this for awhile because it’s been on my mind. I need this message, too.
Count to 3.
Seriously—1, 2, 3…
In that time, across the world, five people have died. And I’m not making that number up. The number of people that die each year is approximately 58 million. If you do the math, that means almost two people die every second of every day.
By the time you’ve read this far, another 30 people have died.
Yet here we are—taking so much for granted, believing that someday we’ll get to everything on our list, and later we’ll make time for the important things. But instead, we spend our time on the urgent things: work, and more work, and the children, and projects, and deadlines. It’s our duty of state, after all—and we tell ourselves that once we get everything nicely in place, *then*, yes, *then*, we’ll make time for the things that really matter.
I watched a short documentary years ago called *BoatLift*, about the people who rushed to lower Manhattan on 9/11 and helped with the evacuation of 500,000 people. Near the end, one of the boat owners said something that stuck with me:
“I have one theory in life—I never want to say the words, ‘I should have.’”
And those words still haunt me.
Other than our spiritual lives, the single most important duty of state that we have is the profound love we direct toward our spouse. Nothing is more important. But because that kind of love doesn’t cry out loud, it’s easy to let all the other fires take our energy—until at the end of the day, we have nothing left to give.
One of the things I love most about spring and summer is the sunrises. Yes, it means getting up earlier, but every time I see the sun rise over the horizon, I’m reminded: each morning is precisely one more chance from God to Love. That’s it. One more chance to turn toward your spouse. One more chance to give, to speak kindness, to touch gently, to serve humbly. Because in the end, the only thing we take with us when we die is Love. And every sunrise feels like God saying, “Love more. Show Me. Show your spouse.”
So maybe you’ve got everything in place. Maybe you can honestly say that if tonight were your last night, you’d have no regrets—that you’ve loved your spouse as deeply and beautifully as possible, and you wouldn’t need to say “I should have.”
But if, like me, you haven’t yet loved your spouse as fully as they deserve—if you’ve let other things creep in and take priority—then when the sun rises tomorrow morning… just begin again.
Show your spouse your love.
It can’t wait any longer.
We may not get another chance.