Teresa Tomeo - God’s Bucket List: Heaven’s Surefire Way to Happiness in This Life and Beyond

But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.

Matthew 6:33

Do you have a bucket list, an itinerary of things you want to do before you die? Maybe you want to swim with dolphins or live in Italy for a year. Maybe you want to hike as far as you can toward the summit of Mount Everest or ride the teacups at Disney World for the very first time. Maybe you want to parachute out of an airplane or explore an underwater shipwreck off the coast of Florida. Or maybe you just want to spend a month at the beach and read all the books youve been meaning to for the last number of years. At the heart of all of these dreams is the desire for adventure, for new experiences. Now, what if we suppose that besides all these things that you want to do in your life before you pass on to the next, God has a bucket list for you, an agenda of adventures He wants you to experience, ways of living before you die? Okay, granted, this list doesnt exist (unless you want to consider Gods commandments a bucket list). Im not suggesting Ive found some secret scroll that requires that we all dance at a luau, but what if God does have a list of things we should do before we die?

This book is about that what if question. This book is also about, well, me and my struggles to figure out what God might want for me before I kick the proverbial bucket. I tell the stories that follow in the hopes that there may be something in my life that mirrors your own and that I can be a helpful hand during uncertain times or a warm smile when you feel like life might be getting the best of you. In any event, I like to tell stories, andin order to explore this imagined idea of a heavenly list of ways to live and things to dothats what Im going to do. So lets begin with one.

Youre so lucky, I overheard one woman say to another while I was shopping at my local Italian market one afternoon. Thats definitely on my bucket list.

Now, by overheard I really mean eavesdropping. I admit it, I sometimes accidently overhear things that others are talking about, but thats just because Im so interested in people. Really!

I started to move a little closer, trying to listen as intently as possible to what it was that was on this womans bucket list. But I bumped into some tomatoes in the produce aisle, sending them everywhere and blowing my cover. When I looked up, the two women had moved on.

Despite my lousy attempt at playing James Bond I was able to catch enough of their conversation to realize they were talking about a wished-for something. Maybe it was a vacation, or a journey to see the pyramids, or bungee jumping. But for me, this exchange represented a sort of confirmation. Almost everyone has a bucket lista list of things to do before kicking the bucket. Even me.

I have to admit Id never heard of a bucket list before the film TheBucketList. Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two terminally ill older men from very different backgrounds who become unlikely friends while undergoing chemotherapy together. When each is given less than a year to live, they decide to make the most of the time they have left. After each makes up a bucket list of places to go, things to do, and people to reconcile with, they set off on a combined journey to fulfill their listswith sometimes funny, sometimes sad results.

That movie made me think about my own life list. I love lists, and even though I didnt call it a bucket list, for most of my life Id had a list of things that I wanted to accomplish in my life. In my twenties and thirties I worked feverishly to cross off this and that, and in my eyes I was quite successful. My goal after graduating from journalism school was to make a name for myself in the broadcast news business, preferably in my hometown of Detroit, which was among the top-ten TV and radio markets in the country. It didnt matter that the standard operating procedure for starry-eyed broadcast news newbies was to pack up and head for Podunk, Idaho, or some other obscure location to supposedly work their way up the media ladder. That was fine for some with lower expectations and for those who were convinced they needed to follow all the so-called procedures and rules to a T. But procedures and rules were meant to be broken, so I went ahead and broke them and managed to land my first radio-news gig at an AM/FM station in suburban Detroit. It wasnt exactly the biggest outlet on the block; as a matter of fact, it was barely a blip on the media radar screen. But it had just what an ambitious and budding journalist needed. It had a decent news department that would allow me to cover some important stories and to rub elbows with the bigwigs.

My aggressive goal setting continued as I moved from one news department to the next, eventually landing my first big TV news gig by the time I was twenty-seven. For a while it was fun and exciting. In addition to pursuing and achieving my dreams, there were other benefits, including a certain amount of notoriety and a not-too-shabby paycheck. Along the way I was also blessed to meet and marry a great guy. This was one for the bonus category, as marriage was not an item on my bucket list.

In the end, though, in my mad desire to make a name for myself, I nearly lost everything that was important to me, personally and professionally. It was then that I realized that so many of our to-do lists, so many of our bucket lists, focus only on sensation and pleasure: swimming the Great Barrier Reef; climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (no way I, or most of us, could get up Everest); A, B, C. However, all these goals seemed to focus primarily on sensory experience. What about the spiritual things in life? Where was God in all of this?