REFLECTIONS

Writing an Epitaph

“From our first babblings to our last word, we make but one statement, and that is our life,” This observation of a character from a Richard Paul Evans novel explains the poignancy of headlines reporting the death of a well known American performer. Every headline in the various papers across the land associated the performer’s life with foul language. What a sad commentary. It didn’t need to be that way. We have but one life to live on this earth, and the choices we make and the purposes we serve will one day be summarized by those that knew us.

Surely this well known comedian would have asked for a do over of life if he saw the epitaph he had written. If every life has a purpose, then his may have only served as a poor example.

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.

If life is committed to objectives that will make a better tomorrow, it will write an epitaph of the lasting difference made during the 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+ 

www.reflectingthesavior.org

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