Cleaning Our Slate Before It’s Too Late!

By Binkles Bee

Many years ago, I was working in an advertising firm. Those days, the trend in the industry was to keep shifting jobs in order to earn a higher salary. I too did this. While leaving a company, I had to hand over the job list to my supervisor or to the person who would take over after I had left. I had to clear my slate clean, with no pending tasks left behind, no incompletions. I was very particular that after I left the company, work should not suffer because of any errors or incomplete assignments on my part.

Today, many years later, I feel the same about life itself. As we move on in life, we should not leave behind any incompletions.

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As the years progressed and I went through new jobs, my life was all about earning, shopping, consuming and things like that. The idea of God-consciousness and awareness of the inevitability of death and the reality of the Hereafter were far from my mind and heart, till a sickness shook me up from my slumber. I looked at the things I had accumulated for myself—expensive clothes, junk earrings, purses and things like that—and I realized that none of these had come of any use to me when I was sick. I thought about what might have happened to all those things that I had been collecting as a sort of escapism from the harsh realities of life had the sickness taken my life. I did what I felt had to—I disposed of them and cleaned my cupboard clean!

I had accumulated a big burden actually, and getting rid of it was an act that symbolized the closure of one phase of my life. It required a sickness for me to realise the importance of bringing God into my life, to acknowledge the reality of death and to throw my collection of fancy earrings into the garbage bin.

I now began praying regularly. It gave me great peace. Often, I would feel that every prayer could be my last prayer and so, I should do it in the best way.

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At 50 plus today, I realise the importance of completing the incompletions or the pending things in my life before God takes me back to Him. So, each day, I feel one should complete the tasks at hand.

As regards the material aspect, I feel that a person who has crossed 50 should draw up a list of things which ‘belong’ to them and write out a document to indicate what should done with them after they have left the world. They should call for a family gathering and settle things between the members of the family. That way, they can try to ensure that they do not leave behind any unpleasant ‘incompletenesses’ after they go.

In addition, a person should try to make sure that by the time they leave the world, they have healed every fractured relationship and are not leaving behind any ‘incompletnesses’ on the emotional front. A person may have wronged another person, sometime or the other, and their relationship may have been impacted thereby. One should seek forgiveness from that person and try to heal the relationship as soon as possible. If that is not possible, for some reason or the other, one should seek forgiveness from God for the wrong they did to that person. This can lighten the heart to a very great extent, so that one may depart from the world less encumbered with heavy emotional baggage.

Likewise, if a person has been wronged by somebody else and harbours sadness or resentment on account of this, it is good if this issue is addressed as soon as possible before they depart from the world. Even if the other person does not reach out to seek forgiveness, one should forgive them in one’s heart, so that one can leave the world free of any grudges against them.

In this way, ideally, no sundered or damaged relationship should be left incomplete when one finally departs from the world.

It is good to leave the world peacefully, with a clean, light heart, free from the burden of guilt, resentment and hurt caused by incompletions. One never knows when one might be called back to the One who sent us here. Our departure from this world can happen at any moment. And so, it is good to complete any incompletions as soon as possible, without any delay.

We should clean our slate before it is too late! When we were little, many of us had a slate to write on. After scribbling on it with chalk, we would clean it. Likewise, we can clean our ‘slate’ every day, trying to complete our incompletions as soon as they arise so that we can hope that when the Lord calls us back to Him (and we never know exactly when that will happen), we depart without leaving any incompletions behind.