Life; does it really matter?

On Sunday I was driving to a restaurant after church, doing what I always do on longish car rides (over 20 minutes), listening to my mp3 player. I was listening to a new playlist that I had just made the night before, filled with “new” songs that I had just downloaded. And as I listened to them, I started to realize a pattern; they were all about living life like it was your last day, or living it without regrets. And this struck me, because that was kind of like what my pastor was talking about in church about forty five minutes before hand, except what he was saying was a little different.

What Pastor Neal was saying it this; we do a lot of things in this life, some good, some bad, but is it all really going to matter in an eternal life?

Basically this is what I got from it; we have freedom of choice in this life, to either follow God, or to not. That is really the only thing that matters in this and the next life. Not living your life to the fullest, not accomplishing “your” dreams, not any of that. The only things that matter are fulfilling God’s plan for you, and accepting Him as your Lord and Savior! Those are the only things that are going to carry on into this next life that, if we so choose, to accept! So my question is this; why do we always think that we have to have the best life? This isn’t a competition here. And when we get to Heaven, it’s not even going to matter anyway. I mean sure it is exciting to do things that we have always wanted to try and whatnot, and there is NOTHING wrong with that, but I think people make too big a deal of it; like in all of those ghost stories of about how they didn’t move on because they had “unfinished business”. That’s not going to happen. God has a plan for everyone, and everyone is going to die when he plans, and everyone is going to do what he plans. And supposedly people know that, but what I will never understand is why people still think that if they do this one thing, their life will be “complete”. If they have Jesus, their life is ALREADY complete, and anyway, that’s the only thing that’s going to matter later right?