Pay attention, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such-and-such a town. We will stay there a year, buying and selling, and making a profit.” You don’t really know about tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for only a short while before it vanishes. Here’s what you ought to say: “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” But now you boast and brag, and all such boasting is evil. James 4:13-16 (CEB)

Your bucket list is probably better than mine. I don't have one. I don't think I ever had one. It's not that I object to beholding the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, for example. It's just that I don't have "those places" as need to do-s. 

For a long time, I felt it was my job as a parent to make good and lasting memories with my children, and some of this involves going to see the wonders of the world. Making memories is a great thing to do with your kids, however old they are.  

But now I have an aversion to self- declared lists, posted for the world to see, of all the stuff I gotta do and see before the bucket is kicked. The competition for the best bucket list, like the largest Twitter following, can be a race to the most self absorbed and narcissistic tendencies. And, then it's all about who's bucket list is the most amazing. 

Jesus didn't have a bucket list except to do the work Father gave him to do. It was one and only one thing: to do what he was born to do. The one and only item on his bucket list remained this: to be able to say "It is finished," his last words, according to John 19: 30. But his whole life was filled with this most wonderful purpose, to be what he was born to be.

To be able to say, "I'm doing what I'm born to do " is a most beautiful response to the life God in all love and grace has given us.  The good news is that we need neither a bucket list nor to be close to the end in order to affirm our meaning and purpose each new day.