No doubt you’re familiar with the story of when the prophet Isaiah was sent to King Hezekiah with the ominous message: “Thus says the LORD, ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live’” (2 Ki. 20:1).

Please join me in reflecting on that incident. What sorts of things do you think the Lord knew Hezekiah needed to do to “set his house in order”?

• Gather his family around and read them his will?
• Tell them where the money and valuables were?
• Assign responsibilities to various ones?

Probably.

But do you think the Lord would have wanted Hezekiah to go beyond the matters of “stuff”?

For example, maybe Hezekiah needed to:

• Ask forgiveness of someone.
• Make amends for some things.
• Speak those words of affirmation and love he’d somehow neglected to give.
• Have that hard conversation he’d been putting off.
• Look that person in the eye and tell him what he most needed to hear.
• Leave gracious words ringing in various ones’ ears.

It seems to me that these are the weightier matters—things we wouldn’t want to have left undone if we were summoned to leave this earth quickly. Because people will always figure out how to deal with the stuff. But what about the things that can’t be said or unsaid once we’re gone? Or mended or amended? Or given or forgiven?

Perhaps a lesson in all this is to live in some semblance of readiness, with our house “set in order,” so that if our departure were to come with little or no warning we should not have left much undone or unsaid.