As I write this, it is five years to the day, hour, and minute, that I retreated from a five minute warmup walk before a daily 5k run, because there was an unusual and contrasting sensation of numbness and pain in the back of my left upper arm, and a tightness—like heartburn, but it wasn’t heartburn—where my neck joins my chest. I drove home from the greenway where I run, and told Leann she should probably take me to the ER because I thought I might be having a heart attack.

She did. I was. Within minutes of being checked out by doctors in the ER, where, after an EKG and other evaluations, I was told I wasn’t having a heart attack, I was stricken with an extremely rare Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD) heart attack. I coded twice. I was brought back. For what?

Dear Reader, that “for what” question has been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of weeks as I approached this five-year anniversary of that potentially life-ending event.  I have pondered all that I have done—and not done—in that five years I have been given. Yes, there are things about these extra five years that I’m a little disappointed I have not completed. But there are things about these extra five years that have totally surprised me: the experiences I have had, the people with whom I have engaged, the chances to practice the gifts of life and love and memory making I have been given.

Early on in this “what-have-I-done-with-my-five-extra-years” thinking, I was doing my daily “free-write” when I found myself nudged about this upcoming anniversary and doing the play-by-play of the activities I had done, and the people I had been with, those hours and days that might have been my “last.” 

The day before was a Sunday. I had led worship and preached that day and it was my turn to provide “special music” while offering was being taken. I sang Pierce Pettus’ song: “God Believes in You.” Had that been the last song I ever sang, it would have been a fine representation of the grace-full theology I believe and practice (the lyric sheet with my handwritten chords and notes to help me sing it were still on the music stand by the piano in the sanctuary when I returned 10 days later). The Friday night before, two high school buddies who were going to the hometown football game that night called to ask if I wanted to meet them for dinner before the game. “Yeah, we had dinner with Matt just three days before he died. We told stories and laughed a lot and we got to talk about a host of our teenage years memories,”  might have been their comments about me and our time together at the “visitation” had I died three days later instead of me being in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal heart attack. About a month before my heart attack my entire immediate family—children, their husbands, and grandchildren—gathered for a week at beautiful Lake Lure, North Carolina. I could name more. There were lots of ways “going out” at that time would have been OK.

As I wrote at that free-write I thought about hardly any of us knowing when it is going to be our last day. If we did, how would we live that day differently? If I knew the “date certain” of my clocking out of this earthly realm, I’m not so sure I would be trying to shove all the undone high hopes and big dreams and important conversations into the time that was left. 

Most of the days of our lives are filled with the mundane, the ordinary, the routine.  I was thinking that whatever time I have left, whether it be just today, or another month, or a decade or two, that time will be sewn together with more of the rhythms of ordinary daily routine than it will with the sublime. I should just pay attention to the ordinary. Appreciate it. Practice it. Embrace it. Instead of being disappointed with what I haven’t done, or what I cannot do because of limitations of time, money, relationships, and other folks’ expectations, I just need to embrace the day. Live in the day. Live in the moment.

During the free-write I wrote “…the clock is ticking.” When I wrote that sentence I heard a ticking clock. I was surprised enough to pause my free write, sit back in my chair and start looking for the source of a clock ticking that I had never heard before there in my study. It was almost loud. At least it was louder than any ticking of a clock I had heard in that very space before. I was surprised when I recognized the clock on a bookshelf about shoulder height when I am standing, and about six feet from my chair. I look at that clock almost every day as I get dressed for whatever I’m about to engage in for the day, whether it’s to go exercise, mow the grass, going sailing, writing some music or wrangling with words in other ways. Why had I never heard it before? Even when there was no other noise going on in the room or the hall and other bedrooms in that part of my home? It made me think about all the quiet and unassuming happenings all around me every day, at every time, that I might miss or don’t notice because I am not quiet enough or still enough to see or hear or taste or smell or feel something that could be insignificant to the larger world, but amazing in its own moment.

When a musician goes into the recording studio to record a song they will often play and sing while listening to a “click track” through their headphones. A click track can be like a drumstick tapping on the metal rim of a drum. It gives a constant reference to the tempo the musician wants to achieve, which allows other musicians to go back later and add other instruments or voices. I’m going to count the ticking clock I hear now—literally as well as figuratively—as a “click track to my life,” and remember it’s there to help me keep going at the right speed to live each moment of each day, and it is also there to keep me from speeding up, or hurrying up, too much to enjoy the beauty and joy that is always there and always within reach.

The clock is ticking. Listen!