Cliff notes: Randy Pausch is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is married with three small children and in August of 2007, found out that he had 6 months to live due to terminal pancreatic cancer. In September of 2007 he gave his last lecture entitled, "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" that was video taped and has since been seen by millions of people.
Primetime has apparently been following him around for some time and last night aired an hour long special entitled, The Last Lecture: A Love Story For Your Life. It was really amazing to see someone handle their impeding death with such wisdom, grace and humor. Pausch was also very transparent when talking about how hard this is because of his family. Particularly because he has small children. He has such a great perspective on living life to the fullest and appreciating the smallest things in life. His lecture (which is now turned into a book) has affected many people in positive ways and has changed so many people's perspectives on their life.
While watching him last night, I was reminded once again how precious and fragile our life really is. The story was moving, thought provoking and after watching it I was so sad. For many reasons. I was sad for his kids, his wife and for him.
While Pausch had some really amazing insights and words of wisdom (my favorite was when he said that the best advice he had ever received was from a flight attendant: when dealing with your children, put the oxygen mask on your face first) the one thing that he didn't want to comment on was religion. He wanted to keep that private. And that made me sad as well.
I don't know if he has a belief in God and in no way want to judge the man. I have no idea what he and his family are going through and pray that I will never have to find out. I do know that if he does believe in God and has found hope in Christ, then he missed a great opportunity to give that hope to someone else - an eternal hope that will never fail. And if he doesn't believe in God, then all these amazing drops of wisdom are meaningless without faith.
I was reminded that all I do and am, and all that I will be remembered for, is meaningless unless it glorifies God.
If you have a chance to watch his lecture, please do so. It opened up great discussion between Lovey and I. I am thankful that I watched it and prayed specifically for him and his family.
1 comment:
I wanted to watch this but we had storms so the weathermen took over the networks. I saw him on Oprah once, though. I too wondered about his faith and assumed that since he wasn't talking that he is not a believer. It's so sad that he has so many things right but may not know the one thing (one person) that matters most.
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