Imagine that you were born with an expiration date on your wrist or scalp. Your parents would know from the moment you were born how long your life would last. When you became old enough to understand what the numbers meant, you would know too. Perhaps you were born in the summer of 1957, on the bubble of the baby boom, and you have known for all these years that your expiration date would be January 3, 2024. Would this be a good or a bad thing?

Some people, I think, would ignore the date, and refuse to acknowledge it or think about it. I was once asked to visit a seriously ill man in the hospital. When I introduced myself as a pastor, he turned his back to me and refused to acknowledge my presence. Perhaps he hated clergy for some understandable reason, but my impression was that he suffered from the fear of dying. To his mind a pastor was the harbinger of death.

Living in denial would be an unhealthy response to the knowledge of one’s expiration date, but there could be other responses that proved just as bad or worse. Someone who knew his expiration date might consider himself invulnerable prior to that date. He might drink heavily, drive wildly, and eat unhealthily because he knew he had twenty more years to go. Of course, those final twenty years might be spent in a wheelchair or on life support. Or they might be spent alone because his reckless lifestyle had alienated friends and family.

Someone else might create a bucket list and begin early to try to accomplish everything on it. They might end up being so busy trying to scratch things off the list that they wouldn’t have time to enjoy the things they do or to love the people they are with. As their expiration date drew near, their only thought would be to finish their list. They would have accomplished much but lived little.

If medical technology were capable of ascertaining expiration dates in utero, some parents would decide to terminate the pregnancy rather than have their child die young. My older brother died from leukemia at 14 – it was a terribly painful time for our family – yet my brother’s short life had an impact for good that reverberates to this day in the lives of many people.

Is it possible that good could come out of knowing one’s expiration date? Certainly. Wise people would “number their days,” in the words of the Psalm, so that they could “gain a heart of wisdom.”

Some people would learn to live in the present, rather than lament the past or worry about the future. In my work with Hospice, I sometimes met people whose impending deaths had taught them to live fully in the moment, to appreciate it, and enjoy it. They are a joy to be around because they have learned to delight in the life they have rather than despair over the life they might miss.

If we all had expiration dates, some people would stop wasting time on things that don’t make a difference. They would quickly develop a sense of whether something was worth spending two hours on or not. I suspect that they would actually be happier, not because they knew when they would die but because they had learned how to live.

I have written, “If we all had expiration dates,” as if this were a far-fetched, sci-fi-like idea, but the writer of the ancient biblical Book of Hebrews believed that this was in fact the case. He wrote: “Just as it is appointed for man to die once…” Appointed to die – an expiration date. We don’t know what that date is, only that it has been set. Knowing this, we can choose how to live fully in the time allotted to us.

I suspect that living this way is psychologically impossible for those who do not believe in a life after death. To live well, a person needs to know that he will die. To die well, a person needs to know that he will live again. Faith is not a substitute for such knowledge but the door that leads to it.