Death

So I was watching House last night (i know more TV, if it makes you feel better it was really the only thing I watched seeing as I fell asleep after it). The episode was really on death and how this guy wanted to die. Because he wanted to know "what was on the other side".
So, this got me thinking (i know big deal). Should we live life, even at its worst, to be eager to leave it? I mean no matter what is going on should there ever be a point were we should only be focused on the here after? Should we want to control how we die or when, or should we be more worried about what I am doing when I am alive.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that we should not think about life after death at all. What I am asking is should this be the driving force, Living life to get to death.
In religions the one (mostly anyway) thing they have in common is they believe that there is life after death.
My thing is though, when talking to others there is this longing to belong to something. Something that is here and now, something that is going to touch someone or have some sort of impact now. Not when they die. So should we not be putting are efforts toward that?
I know as Christian's we make this a big part of our "religion". Even so much as to do things just for the reward we may get when we die. But lets think about what rewards are there in the here an now in just doing something good now. The smile on a face the life that could be touched and better yet changed because of it and not that this is why it was done either. But because we did it because we just plain old wanted to help in LOVE! To me that is the key.
Now I write all this and not even pretending that I know what all the answers are. I write it just to maybe get a conversation started on it so that maybe we could find the answers and maybe we won't find the answers. Cause that is what a community does. They work together. How great would it be that we as "Christian's" or better yet people in religion can just converse and openly talk about things and just maybe we could learn something from each other.
I saw this quote which I think is so good "God expects unity, not uniformity." We often confuse the two. We think in order to have fellowship we all have to be fellows in the same ship. Fellowship does not mean we think alike on everything.

So lets just take this and think about it and maybe just maybe start a converstion on it.

Lata