The Bucket list

Oh, the bucket list.

I feel the need, every year as time grows shorter, to take a look at my bucket list, that list of things I haven't done and always thought that I would or always wanted to.

Things like places I wanted to go:
1. Montana/South Dakota
2. Grand Canyon
3. Hawaii
4. Ireland
5. Back to New York

That's about it. I can't see me getting to any of those places now with my lack of funds, but who knows, I didn't see myself in Israel and I found myself there this year.

Otherwise, what have I missed?

I wrote this seven years ago on this same date:

Has it been another year, already?
Another year older and deeper in debt, Tennessee Ernie Ford sang, which dates me even further.
I was driving the other day, and I began to muse about age, again.
I think of things like that, more and more. I understand on some primal level that I’m running out of time with each birthday, and the number of mornings I can rise are flickering away.
My children aren’t children, any longer. Marriage and child birth have replaced youth softball and My Little Pony and Care Bears. The world is turning faster or my aches are growing at a disproportionate rate and I look in the mirror of my soul and I’ve become my Dad in some ways. And all I can think is:
Remember when gas was 50 cents? When you didn’t have to take out a loan to fill your truck? When you felt safe all the time?
Remember when music actually was sung?
Remember when clothes covered all body parts? When those body parts weren’t covered with anything but clothes?
Remember when marriage was between a man and a woman and the man and the woman actually stayed married?
Remember when political parties actually debated issues instead of screamed at each other, and we actually trusted our leaders?
I get these feelings, these urges, these thoughts each year around this date. It’s like a ticking bomb, these thoughts of how much time and how much can I do with it and how much have I not done and how much would I have done if I had known Christ longer. Now Jesus tells me that by worrying I can’t add a moment to my life. That merely tells me how old I really am. I can’t even remember when I didn’t worry.

What has changed since that 50th birthday? Darn near everything. Now I have back problems and diabetes and high blood pressure and no hair instead of little hair. I have or soon will have seven grandchildren instead of none. I have no "career" but a calling. I have changed nearly everything about my life in those seven years. But what is still missing?

I've had a book published, won all sorts of writing awards. I've seen my grandchildren play baseball. I've heard my son's new CD, or some of it. I've seen people come to Christ. So what haven't I done?

Here's the bucket list as it stands today, on my 57th birthday:
1. I want to see my children really come to Christ, placing him first in their lives with regular church attendance and true worship in their lives. That means or would mean more to me than gold.
2. I want to see my last two books published.
3. I want to be closer to the people in my life, friends I don't see any longer and those that I see occasionally.
4. I want to visit those places i mentioned, but more than anything, I want to go back to Israel and drink from the living water more deeply.
5. I want to help others more, live for them and not myself. I still have so many strains of selfishness in my DNA.
6. I would like to know who my real mother and father were, just for the heck of it. Not even to meet them if they're alive, and they've probably not.
7. I would like to have no bills and some sort of regular bank account.
8. I would like to be a better husband, father and maybe especially grand-father.
9. I would like to play more often, and laugh like I used to laugh before the years and the pains and the bills caught up to my laughter.
10. Finally, I would like to see my Frankie again, but I guess that will have to wait till I get there someday.

That's not a grand jumping out of airplane and climbing Mount Ranier type of bucketlist, but I don't care for any of those things. It's been a great life, a simply life with simple notions of what pleases me. The Saints won the Super Bowl. The Braves won the 1995 World Series. I've been near the top of the mountain and I've seen so far and so wide. What time I have left is up to the Lord, but I pray He allows me (makes me if He will) use it wisely.