By Sandra Drescher-Lehman

"Can you keep a secret, Mom?" my 5-year-old Jonathan said. "Yes." (Well, I can, although he will one day learn that secrecy is not one of my strengths, as I am now telling many people what he said next.)

"Sometimes I pray that we'll all die together in seven years. Because if I die first, you'll be too sad, and if you die first, I'll be too sad. But we'll all be happy together in heaven if we die together." I assumed the "all" meant his dad, his older sister, Maria, and myself. I was right.

understood the sad part. I felt the same way, although I would never admit to praying that strongly for someone else's death. I was curious, though, about the seven years. He said seven was just a good, long time.

 Time is such a relative concept. How long I can or should expect to live is also relative.

 When my cancer was discovered, I was just beginning to read through the Bible with the fifth-grade Sunday school class I was teaching. I was struck again by how long the earliest people lived. Methuselah (Genesis 5:27) lived the longest -- a little under 10 centuries - but others lived a long time, too. To live one century today is amazing. Most of us expect and want to live to be more than 80. If our bodies fall apart before that, we pray for a miracle.

 Faced with my own cancer, I've been pondering the massacres in Joshua and Judges. Ten thousand died here. One hundred twenty thousand were killed there. Sometimes every living thing was taken by the sword. Other times the animals or the women and children were taken as booty.

 I've thought a lot about those women who lost their husbands and brothers and children, and the children who lost their fathers. That was stranger to me than when an entire city was taken. I understood why Jonathan was praying that we all die together.

 I feel small in the face of those passages. I am one tiny life in a long history of people created and loved by God. Beside Methuselah, I'm just getting started. Beside many others, 40 years is already a long life. God doesn't seem to honor a certain age as the right length of time for us to be on earth. In different eras, different ages have been the norm.

 By the time I got to the New Testament in the Bible read-through, a verse in James summed up where I was heading: "What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14b).

 To view my life in the procession of those who have lived before me and who will live and die after me has changed my thinking. I know I'm an important part of the procession -- as important as the Old Testament victors -- but also not any more important than any of those nameless women who died in Joshua's many slaughters. I know I'm special to my family and friends, but in the larger scheme of history, not any more important than all the other mothers who have died of cancer and left small children.

 None of us will get out of here alive. Our departure times will only differ by a matter of years in light of eternity. I think about the fact that this could be the last fall I jump in the leaves with my children. I'm not planning to die this year, but I now know it's a possibility and it doesn't feel morbid. It's part of life's promise.

 This has been the change in my thinking. On the feeling level, where I most often exist, I still want to live long enough to watch my children grow up. If I get that, I'll probably want to watch my grandchildren grow up, too.

 Living, however, after contemplating my place in the procession of life and death, has a different glow to it. It's been a reminder to celebrate the energy I do have. It's time, right now, to tell my family how much I love them and to write in my children's journals. It's time to share my resources more liberally with those who have a need. It's time to spend more on my own stingy self. It's time to pay less attention to conflict in my relationships and work more on planting joy. It's time to refill all those containers that came to our house, piled high with food when I couldn't cook, and deliver them to the next family in need. It's time to think about how lucky I'll be when it's my turn to meet the father-in-law I never knew here, and share his new home [in heaven].