On The Last Leg Of Your Life's Journey ...

Is never easy but don't look for a shortcut.

Having never yet died, I can't speak on how to die, but I can speak on the last leg of the journey getting to that final stop of the trip.  As I see it, life, on this earth is rather like the wagon train adventure the  Donner Party took crossing the western U.S.  On April 15, 1846, the families of James Reed and George and Jacob Donner left Springfield, Illinois to start a new life in California.  They joined a large wagon train crossing the Missouri river and headed west with the sun and their dreams of California livin ... like heaven on earth.  Their journey started easy, happy, and fun, but slowly grew more difficult.  There were breakdowns, lack of water, getting off course, and finally in the high Sierras, on the last leg, winter of their journey, and on a dead-end trail.  Their shortcut had become hardship, hunger, and suffering long before death or "heaven on earth" in California.

You see, it's the trip to heaven, the direction we take, and the trail we choose to get there that we must choose most carefully... and then deal with, as our travel into old age becomes more and more and more challenging, and then impossible.  Heaven is, indeed, out there, but all trails do not lead to California ... or to heaven.  The Donner Party got sidetracked, deceived, misled, and lost because all trails do not lead to life in California ... or to heaven.  Even the right trail is hard ... but not as hard as the hundreds of wrong trails.  All but one lead to greater suffering and end in hell.

Old age, even for the Christian, though blessed with long life, brings with it some unique hardships, if lived long enough.  Things like your legs dying before you do.  That's why they call it the last leg of life's passage ... I guess.  Just be sure you are on the right trail though it be narrow and difficult, it leads to Jesus and perfect life.

So when you lose your legs, your sleep, your health, your mate, or almost your mind ... learn to rest in your hope in Jesus.  And, as a teenage girl, who survived the Donner Party's dead-end death trap later wrote, to a friend back in Illinois, "Don't never take no short-cuts".