“I have taken care of so many patients who arrived at their life’s end completely unprepared. They haven’t considered the many decisions they might be asked to make about end-of-life medical interventions. They aren’t familiar with the benefits and harms of things like CPR or mechanical ventilation ……. They haven’t invested in the relationships that matter most to them. And they’ve not thought about the bigger questions of life and death. They’re suddenly asking, What do I believe? How do I make sense of my life? I talk in the book about the great writer Susan Sontag who thought deeply about so many things. Yet she never wanted to talk about death, even when she was actively dying. Her son was at her bedside, but he felt he could not even say goodbye, because that would require admitting to her that she was dying. As doctors we can and should help people die better and die wisely.” https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/lost-art-dying-well

The first principle to die well is the resist the medicalization of death. The second principle is to “live well to die well.” By living well, I am not referring to a healthly lifestyle of diet and exercise, but something far more important. What does it mean to live well? In a nutshell, it means living for the glory of God . . . in everything we do. “I want to learn more of what it means to live well now in order that I may die well in the future,” – Dying Well: Dying Faithfully by John Wyatt, MD

“I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: ‘Look, Lord. See my shells.’ That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.” – John Piper, “Don’t Waste Your Life”

“We are living in the first time in history where Christianity has been boxed into the private sphere and has largely stopped speaking to the public sphere.”
Martin Marty, “The Modern Schism: Three Paths to the Secular”

I have discussed this in a previous post about the false dichotomy of separating secular from sacred. This is a false dichotomy arising out of the Enlightenment. Don’t fall for it. Everything should be done for the glory of God

• So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. ( 1 Cor 10:31)
• And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus (Col 3:17)
• Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men (Col 3:23)

Christianity is Total truth that applies to every area of life and endeavor; do everything for the glory of God (Col 3:17; 1 Cor 10:31). The culture wants you to keep your faith private and out of the public arena. – “religion is consigned “to the private sphere, where illusory beliefs are acceptable ‘if they work for you.’”, Phillip Johnson, The Wedge Of Truth. But every part of your life should be lived for the glory of God life. All of life is sacred; there is no secular aspect to life.

To divide life into “sacred” and “secular” denies what it means to be in the image of God. Maxwell Hutchinson, an architect and Anglican deacon from east London, suffered a serious stroke in 2015 at the age of 65 and nearly died three times. Maxwell believes this experience taught him he was not as well prepared for death as he should have been. He says: “I found there were aspects of my life with which I was extraordinarily unhappy. I realized that the quality of life hereafter is dependent on the condition in which you enter it.”
https://www.artofdyingwell.org/talking-about-death/talking-death/dying-well-starts-living-well/

The playwright Dennis Potter, spoke very vividly on living for the present in a television interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994, two months before his death from cancer of the pancreas and liver, at the age of 59. Potter says we’re the only animals that know we are going to die, and yet we forget that life can only be defined in the present tense. He describes what it is like to understand this for the first time:
“That nowness becomes so vivid to me now, that in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene, I can celebrate life. Below my window, for example, the blossom is out in full. It’s a plum tree. It looks like apple blossom, but it’s white. And instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s nice blossom, looking at it through the window when I’m writing, it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there ever could be. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter but the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.” – Melvyn Bragg’s interview with Dennis Potter broadcast April 1994.

Jonathan, a retired historian at the University of Cambridge, had this advice for the dying: “Enjoy the life left to you and be grateful for it. I am sure that you, like me, will have been astonished to find how quickly you have come to terms with a new existence, in which every moment, lived as though it is your last, becomes precious. I found that my senses were intensified, my curiosity was sharpened and the beauty of natural objects and the vividness of my surroundings were enhanced. You will discover yourself embracing this vision, which is the one we had as children, lost with age and now recovered. It is exhilarating and rewarding.”
From an article that first appeared in The Tablet, 24 September 2016, page 6.

The popular Dominican writer and preacher, Timothy Radcliffe, who was being treated for cancer of the mouth, puts it like this: “The best way to prepare for eternal life after death is to enjoy it now, for eternal life has begun, and it bubbles up every time that we love and live and forgive. We do not believe in the ‘after life’ but the eternal life of God’s unquenchable love. And so whether I shall live for a short time or, less likely, for long, I give thanks for this experience of the fragility of my life. I must not put off living until it is too late. Carpe Diem!” (Carpe Diem means “seize the day”)

“We have a responsibility to practice stewardship of the gifts God has given us.”
— Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey

Part 5 is here