“So, what you’re looking for is quality of life.” That was the response I got last week from a doctor. I had just explained my current physical condition—that the pain in my damaged tendons was making daily tasks difficult, sometimes impossible. This doctor was someone I thought may have some ideas previous doctors did not. He did have some suggestions, but that phrase, ‘quality of life,’ jarred me.
Quality of life is something you’re supposed to talk about with super-elderly people or someone with late-stage cancer, not a fifty-eight-year-old with no disease. Yet, here we were, talking quality of life.
What did it mean? It meant, what can I do to make my daily life a little easier, a bit less painful, and maybe even slightly more enjoyable? What it doesn’t mean is that I am at the end of my life. Of course, with my condition, I could be nearing the end of my earthly life, but we don’t know that. So, we will focus on quality of life—getting the most out of the life I have been given for as long as it lasts.
The phrase kept circulating through my mind. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, isn’t quality of life something we should always be striving for, not just at the end of our lives? Shouldn’t I make every day the very best quality I possibly can, regardless of my medical condition? Then my devotional reading from In All Things: a nine-week study on Unshakeable Joy by Melissa Kruger had this quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones:
If ever the world needed the witness and testimony of Christian people, it is at this present time. The world is unhappy, it is distracted and frightened, and what it needs is to see stars shining out of the heavens in the midst of the darkness, attracting the world by rebuking that darkness, and by giving it light, showing how it too can live that quality of life.
I don’t know when Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote that, but it couldn’t be more timely. Our world is definitely unhappy, distracted, frightened, and overcome by darkness. But we have the light of Christ within us, shining through us as we live life abundantly (John 10:10). The darkness doesn’t have a chance because to God even darkness is as light, the night as bright as the day (Psalm 139) That quality of life – the kind of life that resembles starlight rebuking darkness – that’s the kind of quality of life I want and one I will strive for.
Where do you rate your quality of life? Does it depend on your circumstances or physical condition or job or the outcome of your favorite team (mine won this week, just sayin)? If it does, you’ll never experience the highest quality of life available to you, the kind that shines out of the heavens, rebuking the darkness.
This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. 1 John 1:5 NKJV
Lisa J Radcliff ~ Finding Freedom from the Past 
Amen!
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