REFLECTIONS
January 15, 2006
 
 
"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
 What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?
Ecclesiastes 1:2-3
 
 
Writing an Epitaph
 
In his book, The Letter, Richard Paul Evans has one of his characters observe, “From our first babblings to our last word, we make but one statement, and that is our life.”  So how poignant were the recent headlines reporting the death of a well known performer. Every headline that I saw in the various papers that crossed my hands that day associated the performer’s life with foul language. How sad commentaries like this are and they need not have been that way. We have but one lifetime to live and the choices we make and the purposes we serve will one day be summarized by those that knew us.
I’m sure that this person would have asked for “overs” if he saw the epitaph he wrote with his life. The best I can say is that if every life has a purpose, then this one may have served only as a poor example. That is exactly why I mention it.
Life is not meaningless unless we choose to direct our lives toward meaningless objectives. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard, writes, “Meaning is not a luxury for us. It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our souls to live. It is a ‘going beyond,’ a transcendence of whatever state we are in toward that which completes it. The meaning of present events in human life is largely a matter of what comes later. Thus, anything that ‘has no future’ is meaningless in the human order.”
We have all chased after the wind at some time in our lives. At the end of the chase there is only the emptiness of wasted time. And a persistent chasing of one wind after another writes an epitaph of a wasted life. We can choose something better.
When we commit to objectives that will serve to make a better tomorrow, we are writing an epitaph of the lasting difference we made during our days of labor under the sun. And it will be an epitaph of a job well done.
 
“You are the light of the world,”

Richard Ì


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