February 5 legendary actor Kirk Douglas passed away at 103 years old. His movie roles spanned more than six decades, and actors and filmmakers today are still shaped by some of his iconic roles.
But Douglas himself was impacted by a much different, and more traumatic, event. One that would forever shape his life. Just over 29 years before a helicopter crash took the life of Kobe Bryant, Douglas was in a similar crash. But he survived. And it changed him forever.
“I’ll never forget the date,” Douglas wrote in the opening of his 2000 autobiographical work Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning. As reported by USA Today, Douglas was 74 and was a passenger flying with his pilot friend, cartoon voice artist Noel Blanc, from California’s Santa Paula Airport. Blanc took the Bell Ranger helicopter up for the routine flight, flying tragically into the path of a Pitts aerobatic plane flown by Lee Manelski with a student pilot, David Tomlinson.
The two aircraft collided. The rotor of the helicopter sliced the wing of the plane. The plane exploded and the helicopter, with its rotor torn off, fell about 20 to 40 feet and crashed onto the tarmac. Both people in the plane died, and both in the helicopter survived.
Douglas would look back on that day as “the most important day of my life,” and it would be the day that would alter his life “forever.” He made changes in his life. He stepped up his philanthropic work, and he sought professional help to deal with the emotional impact of pulling through the crash while two others died.
Years later, as he continued to deal with chronic pain from the crash, Douglas would come to see the emotional burden as a call to something bigger than himself. “It took me a long time to come to this conclusion,” Douglas wrote. “My life was spared in that helicopter crash because there was still some mission that I must fulfill.”
Douglas’ brush with death rattled him, and his response echoes the way we would all respond when faced with a tragedy. In short, take stock of your life, and don’t waste what is left.
Occasionally a major event will shake us out of our complacency. It might come from a tragedy. Or an unexpected calamity. Or even a pivotal failure. It’s the middle-aged man’s medical crisis. It’s the drug addict who wakes up to realize he has a child that needs him. It’s the friend who points out you are on a path that will end in nothing good, the parent who dies before you can reconcile, the financial crisis that hits you like freight train.
It is any moment, any event, that shakes you up and makes you pause and take stock and survey the direction your life is going. And maybe you see that you are in a place you don’t like, on a path you need to change, protecting priorities that turn out to be petty.
If that has happened to you, how should you respond?
First, be grateful. Grateful for life, for hope, for time to do what needs to be done. Grateful, that is, for second chances. “Giving thanks always for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20).
Second, trust God with the circumstances. Whatever situation or crisis shakes you out of your selfish slumber, God can use it. But take it to Him in prayer first, and seek what God wants you to do. Remember Nehemiah? God put him in the right place at the right time to overhear a conversation that would convert him from a butler to a leader. We are responsible for what God shows us and tells us (1:1-11). “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
Third, step up. Rise from your complacency and seize the opportunity to make whatever changes you need to make. Pay attention to the opportunities God has given you. Remember Esther? She was a queen who wanted to live a quiet life and be left alone. But God shook her out of her complacency with a revealing conversation that set her on the course of saving her people from mass slaughter. God shakes us out of our complacency so we can see what is going on around us the way He sees it (Es. 4:1-17).
Fourth, look ahead to the new purpose God has for you. Probably no better example exists than the Apostle Paul. Stopped in his tracks on a dusty road, God opened his eyes to the trajectory of his life and showed him it had to change. And even more important, God had a purpose for him far greater than anything he could have ever imagined on his own (Acts 9:1-18).
And for the rest of his life, Paul lived and served in gratitude for his second chance to change his life, a chance to stop wasting his life on smaller things and start impacting the world for the greater cause of Christ. “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).
All of these people were shaken awake by circumstances they didn’t expect, but which God used for His purposes. Maybe that has happened to you. Or maybe you just need to take stock of the direction your life is headed.
Remember, God has given you your life for a purpose (1 Cor. 4:1, 1 Thess. 4:1).
Don’t waste it.