A while ago I said to Pam – the problem with ‘living life to the fullest’, wanting to experience everything that the world has to offer, to constantly be in motion, and to sample all that is fresh and new and piquant, is that at the end of your 80 years on earth you would find yourself having done nothing of worth for people, and leaving nothing of worth in God’s eyes. The two are related. There are only two things that God has called us to love – Himself, and people, because only God and people are eternal. As C. S. Lewis has said (and I loosely paraphrase) – What a fearsome, awesome yet incredible thought… that all these absolutely commonplace personages we interact with daily, with their quirks and failings and grunts and odours, are eternal beings worthy of being endued with God’s fullest intent and glory! And so how we lead our lives, and decide if what we are doing is worthy of our very limited time and energies, is basically this: If we are not loving and blessing others, or being loved and blessed by others – then there is no work here for us to do here, and no reason for us to stay. There is so much that the world distracts and entices us with that we must cling on to this to not lose sight of the race marked out for us.

I think I’ve finally figured out what it is about old people dying on their own in one-room flats that really bothers me. It isn’t so much the poverty or the disease and suffering. It’s the isolation. If “man is nothing but a knot of relationships” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) then crossing from life to death utterly unnoticed, unheeded, and unmissed must be the ultimate dehumanising experience. In fact, it goes beyond dehumanising – it nullifies one’s very existence. It's truly a reflection of our fallen state that a thing of such wondrous and everlasting worth and beauty, a human being created in God's image, should be so forgotten and unloved.