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Last in the wedding line.

Turning 40 for me was a milestone. Being halfway through life can be troubling sometimes. And it could be more troubling when you've never married. I've never been a pleasure seeker but to look back on my pathway though,  I can't help remembering that movie the bucket list. People say that you should regret your life especially when you come to the end of it, but being halfway through I am reminded that it is only a number. I've been through dark valleys, and I've been through times of great despair. But looking back at your life at 41, you can say that there still some things that I wish I had of done. When things slow down, your heart races.  I used to believe that age was only a number, and in fact that exactly is what it is. When you are younger you worry about the future, and when you're older you worry about not having enough time left. I remember a time when I was in college, there was a concept in life that I had there too at that particular time. I am not that person anymore, but the memories that I have of that time in my life reminded me that I gave up a lot of stuff. If I could talk to the me when I was 20 years old, I would say that the grief that you might experience when you're older is worth giving up certain things now. We were told that to have a child's heart is something that we should never lose, what is more important than keeping a child's heart is having peace of mind and peace with yourself and with God. There really are no second chances in life, The only second chance that we get has to do with something called repentance. When you have repented of something it means that you're giving up pretty much everything else!

You don't have to be totally broken to understand that there is more to life than the things around us! My life has been plagued with depression at times, and it was a mild depression that let me to understand that I needed to make a change in my life. There was a time in my life when I was unsure that my sins were forgiven. I remember having a conversation with some friends of mine when I was in high school, I told them that I had just become a born-again Christian, it was actually after high school but they were high school friends. One of my friends was questioning why he needed to be forgiven, he told me that he could wait until his very last breath possibly when he was an old man dying in the hospital to ask God if he would forgive him. I told him that's not really how it works that we should repent when we have the time and the time is now for us to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. He still said that he could do that whenever he wanted to and you can wait until his last moment in life. I didn't know how to answer him really, I just knew that he was wrong.

Life is filled with many things, add to party your life away could work for some people, but when I was 21 I understood that I was a sinner. I wasn't forced to believe in God by some patriarchal authority, I came to understand on my own that I needed to repent and ask Christ to be my Lord and Savior. There comes a time when we all need to see for our own self, that happiness is not always the right answer in life. Pride is what keeps us from a right relationship with God, and even after we repent pride can be a problem. The Bible tells us that Jesus can save to the uttermost. What does the uttermost mean? That means he has the ability to save us from ourselves, when we repent he forgives us of all of our sins. Faith is always the answer in the light of an uncertainty. Faith bridges the gap that we cannot cross. And faith leads us to the cross of Calvary. When we've been to Calvary there's no need to turn and go back there, if our faith leads us back to Calvary it is for the purpose of living our lives day to day. To believe in something is to have faith in something, and faith works only when we practice it. To be last in the wedding line means, that you've given everything up to be first in the kingdom of God, A position only Christ can fulfill. This is Mike.

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