There’s an interesting question. When you’re dead and gone and they put an epitaph on your headstone, what will it say?
I was at a 60th birthday party recently. Not quite the same as a funeral, but it was nevertheless a time when family and friends stood up and eulogised – literally “spoke well of” – the birthday boy, David. A lot of it was humorous, but there was one thing that one of his sons said about dad, that hit me between the eyes:
At some point, we all get to feeling burnt out … like life’s passed us by. Doesn’t matter how successful we are or appear to be. It hits us all sometime. We look at all those smart, clever, brilliant people all around us and kind of figure that God must be done with us.
The older I get, the easier it seems for me to fall into the trap of thinking “I’ve seen it all”. But fortunately, God keeps bringing things across my path to convince me otherwise! Like the other day on the bus – there was a young Jewish teenager wearing a black yarmulke (those little skull caps that Orthodox Jewish men wear). That’s fine, we have a strong, vibrant Jewish community around where I live.
After a pretty spectacular start to His ministry – the voice from Heaven and all that (Luke 3:21,21) – Jesus embarked on a rocky road. Forty days and nights starving in the desert with just the devil to keep Him company (Luke 4:1-13), a lynch mob in His home town (Luke 4:28,29) and then years of being criticised, tested, plotted against.
Every felt like that? Completely at the end of your tether? And we kind of look at God and whether we say it to His face or whether we just think it to ourselves – what we really want to know from Him is …
There are few things as frightening as a stormy ocean. I’ve often watched the grey waves whipped up by a storm, crashing on rocks below, from my very safe vantage point on land. I’m definitely a land-lover – solid ground beneath my feet … doesn’t get any better than that.
I suspect that’s pretty natural. We all like security.
Have you ever been in a place where you just don’t know which way to turn … or what to do? You know,the pressure builds up and you turn this way but the door’s closed and the way is blocked. So you turn the other way and same thing. Can’t go that way either.
Many a person walking planet earth today would say that the Rolling Stones had it completely right when they sang:
I can’t get no satisfaction,
I can’t get no satisfaction.
One of the rudest shocks I’ve ever experienced in my life is the transition from life in the military, back to “civvy street”. Things were pretty simply in the Army – everybody had a rank, you knew where you stood and that was it. By and large the system worked pretty well although it was a culture we took for granted.
Back in my days training to be an Army Officer they taught us a lot about leadership. Problem was I was much too young and immature to ‘get it’. I graduated as a Lieutenant firmly convinced that my rank gave me power and the higher the rank that I was able to achieve, the more power I would have.
Every now and then a news story comes along that shocks and unsettles us. Such is the story of Natalie Wood, the pensioner who would have been 87 this year … except for the fact that she died 8 years ago and her skeleton wasn’t discovered in her rundown, forlorn looking house until just the other day.
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