What Does Your Life Stand For?

LISTENING to Gheorghe Zamfir’s Lonely Shepherd, I know God is going to take my mind’s heart off to some distant galaxy that has its best view of my life as I live it right now.

Isn’t it peculiar how far we need to go from our inner lives in order to see the inner life for what it is?

The problem is this: we do not learn early enough in life (if, indeed, we learn ever at all) to look at life and live it from the eternal perspective.

Yet life is but a wisp, a piece of fluff on the carpet so easily sucked up by the vacuum pressure of life.

We miss the point of life. We don’t get to understand the eternal gravity of life. Like the undeniable significance of dependence. My son is so dependent on me. When he went into a bed, having graduated from his cot, it was such an important moment for him. It was an important moment for me and my wife. He was no longer a baby.

Our families are growing as we speak and listen and consume time for understanding.

We don’t get back one second that is given us.

In all truth, there are bound to be regrets — things we wished we had done or not done or done better. But regrets are positive, in that, they impel us; they motivate us to do better before it’s too late.

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And where does this end?

It ends at the point where we ask ourselves a question that has no answer; no answer, but an invitation. What does our life stand for? The way we are living our lives, what does it stand for?

Our lives are passing away, yet we have this day.

What are we to do with our life this day, given the eternal nature of such a fleeting life has a remarkability about it that we cannot deny.

One day we meet God. That day we will give an account. Actually, our lives will account for us. We will stand before God, kneeling as an expression of thunderstruck awe, and our life will be right before us. We will know what God is saying. What will God say?

What is missing from our lives is the mode of peaceful, daily reflection — not about what we seek or desire, but it’s about how we are behaving. It’s not about the things God is yet to give us, but it’s about what we are doing with what we’ve already got. It’s not about ministry or even the lost. It’s about family, principally. Then it’s about the lost. It’s about the human family and creation. It’s not about what angers us. It’s more about what should impassion us, but isn’t. What do we do about the truths of life that matter most to those who love us; those we are called, sacrificially, to love?

It’s about the simpler things; being grateful for the simple things.

What is eternity saying as we look back at our lives from there? (A ‘sneak peak’.)

There is today, this day alone, and no other presentation of time or life to work with.

What is to be done in this day?

© 2015 Steve Wickham.