Borrowed Time and Borrowed Breath

Borrowed Time and Borrowed Breath

The past few days haven’t been kind to me.

I was taken down by a stubborn cold and flu, the kind that drags time until night feels endless. Nights soaked in sweat, a cough that refuses to be ignored, a nose so blocked it feels like breathing becomes a negotiation. Sleep came in fragments, and when it did, it carried me somewhere strange.

I don’t know if it was a lucid dream or something else entirely. I felt awake, aware, but trapped inside my own sleep. My body wouldn’t move. My mind, however, was loud. Too loud.

That’s when the thoughts came.

Death.

And no, it’s not the kind of topic you want knocking on your mind when your body is already weak. It doesn’t help — not even a little. The dream stretched on, heavy and dark, layered with sleep paralysis and theories my exhausted mind kept building without permission.

If I die now, what happens to me?

What becomes of my family?

I am in a foreign land, what happens to my body?

Who makes those decisions?

You know those thoughts. The ones that don’t shout but whisper until they sit comfortably in your chest. The ones that don’t leave when morning comes. They linger, long after the fever breaks.

When I finally woke up, heart racing, I did what many of us do when reality feels too heavy, I reached for my phone. I needed noise. A distraction. Something to pull me out of myself. YouTube opened, and almost ironically, a sermon by Joyce Meyer appeared on my screen.

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not the simple kind.

As I listened, something shifted. It dawned on me in a way that felt both sobering and strangely freeing: this life we fight so hard to preserve, protect, and control is not really ours. Not in the way we think.

We are living on borrowed time.

That thought sat with me, uncomfortably honest.

If time is borrowed, then why are we so frantic?

Why are we exhausted by proving ourselves, by overworking, by carrying grudges like full-time jobs?

Why am I stressing myself to show up perfectly at work, to push and push, when the one thing I cannot outwork is mortality?

These are dangerous questions — not because they lack faith, but because they strip us of illusions.

Yes, I am a child of God. And still, I have questions.

Faith does not cancel curiosity. Belief does not silence wonder. If anything, faith invites deeper asking, the kind that refuses shallow answers.

If life is temporary, why do we waste so much of it hurting each other?

Why is cruelty easier than kindness?

Why do we cling so tightly to anger when time itself is slipping through our fingers?

Illness has a way of humbling us. It slows the body enough for the mind to finally catch up. In weakness, clarity sneaks in. You begin to see how fragile everything is, titles, plans, timelines, even the image you work so hard to maintain.

And yet, in that fragility, there is also meaning.

If time is borrowed, maybe the point isn’t to hoard it but to spend it well.

To love recklessly.

To forgive faster.

To ask better questions.

To stop living like tomorrow is guaranteed and start living like today is intentional.

That night didn’t give me answers, and maybe that’s the gift. It left me with something far more powerful: awareness. An unsettling but honest reminder that life is brief, sacred, and not meant to be lived on autopilot.

Perhaps the real tragedy isn’t death itself, but how often we forget to truly live while we’re here.

And maybe, just maybe, those uncomfortable questions are not signs of weak faith, but invitations into deeper truth.

What unsettled me most wasn’t the fear of dying itself, but how quickly my mind began to inventory my life. Not memories, responsibilities. Unfinished plans. Expectations I felt bound to. Roles I play so well that I sometimes forget they are not my identity.

In those moments between coughing fits and half-sleep, I realized how much of life is lived in preparation for a future we assume we will reach. We save joy for later. Rest for later. Love for when things slow down. And yet sickness has a brutal way of reminding us that the body does not negotiate with ambition.

There I was, thousands of miles away from home, reduced to something very human and very small; breath, fear, prayer. No performance. No productivity. Just existence.

It made me wonder whether we confuse purpose with pressure.

We call it diligence when we are burning out. We call it discipline when we are emotionally absent. We call it strength when we are simply afraid to stop. And somehow, we baptize all of this as virtue.

But what if life was never meant to be conquered?

What if it was meant to be witnessed?

In that dark night, faith didn’t arrive as thunder or certainty. It arrived quietly, like a thought tapping on my chest: You are not in control, and you never were. And strangely, that truth didn’t terrify me. It softened me.

If time is borrowed, then grace must be the currency.

Grace for ourselves when we cannot show up strong.

Grace for others when they disappoint us.

Grace for a world that is broken and still trying.

I don’t have neat conclusions. I woke up still sick. The questions didn’t evaporate with the fever. But something shifted, a gentler way of holding life, a refusal to rush past meaning in pursuit of survival.

Perhaps the goal is not to outrun death, but to make peace with life.

To live awake.

To love without postponement.

To believe that even our darkest nights can carry quiet revelations, if we are brave enough to sit with them.