A life list or a bucket list—the basic idea has been around ever since the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus' History sent Greeks eagerly across the Mediterranean to see Luxor and the pyramids. Phoebe Snetsinger had her "life list." That's what bird watchers call the summation of their years of devotion. Phoebe had long been an enthusiastic birder, but when a doctor gave her a diagnosis of terminal cancer near her 50th birthday, she began traveling to ever more distant and daunting environments to see rare bird species. Meanwhile, her disease went into remission. By the time she died, in 1999, at age 68, she had spotted a then-record 8,400 species, nearly 85 percent of the world's known winged creatures. Her achievement is an admittedly extreme example of what the life list has become in the broader culture: things to experience while you still have time.

Others prefer to use "bucket list," a term from the 2007 film in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play stricken men who set out to do all the things they've wanted to do before kicking the bucket. The screenwriter, Justin Zackham, says that phrase just happened to be what he called an epic to-do list pinned to his bulletin board. So he used it in the film.

Life list or bucket list? What's on yours? What should be on your list? Or as a Christian bound for a place of infinite glory and joy, do we even need a bucket list?