You have one month to live. Surely you'd want to get the most out of your remaining days. You'd want to live passionately, purposefully, the way we were created to live. That is the premise of a new book called "One Month to Live" by Kerry and Chris Shook (WaterBrook Press, $19.99).

"By embracing the fact that our time on earth is limited, we can live deliberately, no longer postponing the joy and peace that come from fulfilling our God-given destiny," say the authors, a husband and wife who founded Fellowship of the Woodlands Church near Houston.

Wanting to explore the topic further, we asked people of various faiths: "If you knew you had only one month to live, how would you live your life? Would you live your life differently than you are now?"

The answers proved similar to conclusions reached by the Shooks.

"Usually people with a strong faith don't have as much fear of death," Kerry Shook said in an interview with the couple. "They have a lot of peace, a clarity of purpose in living their lives."

Yet the authors found that most people are not becoming what God wants them to be.

"Most people just go through the motions of life," Kerry said. "We want to help people not just to exist but to come alive."

The authors also acknowledged that some people are at the place God wants them to be.

One reason the couple wrote the book, subtitled "Thirty Days to a No-Regrets Life," is that "we want to get to that place where if we heard that we had one month to

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live, we wouldn't have much to change," Kerry said

Toward that end the authors ask readers to sign a "One Month to Live Challenge" in which they "commit with God's strength to live the next 30 days as if they are my last so I can experience life to the full."

So far, members from about 500 churches across the country have taken up the challenge.

Many people of faith told us there's not much they would change. Many said they were intentional in trying to live according to the dictates of their religion.

"As a Sikh, I am admonished to live every day as though it were my last," said Karta Purkh Khalsa of Kansas City, Mo. "If we live righteously, then we must live that way whether we have 30 years, 30 days or 30 seconds to live."

The idea of a "bucket list," similar to that of the characters in the recent movie "The Bucket List," is tempting, Khalsa said.

His list would include visiting holy places and people in India and, if money and time allowed, in Europe and the Middle East "that have helped to guide me on this particular path."

Melissa Higgins of Independence, Mo., a Baha'i, said she hadn't feared death until she had children — and even then it wasn't a fear of death so much as a fear of leaving them motherless.

"I imagine I would be bolder about sharing my faith," she said. "I imagine at the grocery store checkout, telling the cashiers I've been acquainted with for years and years, 'I've got 26 days left before I go to meet my Maker. I want to tell you about the Baha'i faith. It'll change your life. Here's a little book and my number.' Why not?"

Another Baha'i, Barb McAtee of Overland Park, Kan., said she would praise God for her life, thank God for the life to come, and pray for guidance to finish the work she was put here to accomplish.

"I would review my will and testament," she said. "It is a law of the Baha'i faith that each person should write one.

"I would contact family and friends, convey to them my deepest love for them. I would ask them to forgive me for any way I might have hurt them. Likewise, I would assure them of my total forgiveness of them."

Rabbi Scott White of Congregation Ohev Sholom in Prairie Village, Kan., said: "Our sages taught that God asks three questions when he encounters the nearly deceased: 'Did you study Torah daily?' 'Were you always fair in your business dealings?' and 'Did you amply partake of life's permissible pleasures?'

"On that basis, if I found out I had a month to live, I'd ask my wife and kids what would be their dream monthlong family vacation, pay the fair price on everything and bring along a few favorite volumes of Torah teaching to peruse each morning before hiking or waterskiing or sightseeing or going to the Western Wall in Jerusalem near the end of the last day."

For a practicing Muslim, the question is not difficult to answer, said Syed E. Hasan of Shawnee, Kan., "because the reality of death is always part of our life."

A Muslim should ensure that "all of his or her actions conform to the rules laid out in the Qur'an and elaborated upon by Prophet Muhammad (peace be on him) because the sole purpose of a Muslim's life is to seek Allah's pleasure."

Hasan said he would make sure he had provided for the distribution of his assets according to Islamic law and ask forgiveness from anyone he might have harmed in words or actions.

He also would "repeatedly ask Allah's forgiveness and to save me from the torture of the grave and to grant me, with his mercy, a place in heaven."

If Buddhists are practicing well, they are living happily in the moment, said Bethany Klug of the Heartland Community of Mindful Living in Kansas City.

With only a month of moments to go, she said she would close down her holistic medicine practice, ask her husband to take a leave of absence and spend her last 30 days with him.

David E. Nelson of Gladstone, Mo., a Lutheran, said he would continue doing what he is doing because his life is "very much in harmony."

This would include entertaining, hiking with his wife in the Rocky Mountains and visiting children and grandchildren. And he would complete each visit with, "I love you."

But he said he would not want to know the timing of his death.

Nelson said he loves Martin Luther's comment concerning death: "If I knew I were to die tomorrow, I would plant a tree today."

Gary Langston of Kansas City, an American Indian, said he is at peace with death, viewing it as "just another one of the steps that I am taking on my way back to the loving arms of the Creator.

"I do not live my life with regrets nor 'I should haves,"' he said. "I continually feel, think and evaluate what I truly believe or know to be true for me in each moment. I live my life trusting that I am making the right choice at that moment."

After the initial wave of panic, said Josef Walker of Independence, Mo., a Catholic, he would prepare for his impending death by recalling the phrase he has heard so often in funeral Masses: "Life is changed, not ended."

"In the sacrament of baptism, I have been buried with Christ and raised to a new life that I am already living," he said. "I am on an uninterrupted journey that started when God thought me up and gave me life, a journey that continues through this physical existence and proceeds on into eternity."

He would not run around doing a lot of special things, he said.

"If I could adjust one attitude in my final days, I would hope I could be even more appreciative of how wonderful this phase of life is."

Christian Science teaches "that God is life, in which there is no death, and that we live with God in one endless day," said Pamela Peck of Lake Quivira, a Christian Science practitioner.

She said she hopes to have a sense that she has finished the work God has given her and would do nothing differently "unless I felt my work was not finished here or that disease was getting dominion over me and taking me out."

"Then I would challenge death, just as I would challenge any other obstacle, sin or disease that threatened my spiritual progress.

"Death is never God's will, but we are entitled to move on when we have learned the lessons of this experience and served faithfully."