My Thoughts. . .

Monday, 08-12-2019

When I was in elementary school, we would see a high school student and think he was old.  If he was thought to be old, what about our parents and grandparents?  The parents were real, real old and the grandparents had “real” so many times before “old” that you could not count them!  There was a saying to describe such a person.  He had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel!  The older folks would use the expressions “twenty years ago” or “twenty years from now.”  Those terms were as incomprehensible and in the same category as our thoughts were on how long eternity is or how big is God.  Age was seldom the center of our communication.

I didn’t spend much time wandering through cemeteries as a child or teenager.  When a teen friend was killed in an auto or hunting accident, it produced questions, but with school, dating, and such, the event and thoughts were put away and seldom brought up after the funeral.  It became past history.  However, as time passes, circumstances in life will require occasional graveside visits.

When you visit one, looking for the grave marker of a loved one, you may be distracted by how short or long others have lived?  Today, the average life span is 77 for men and 81 for women.  That age seems like a galaxy, far, far away when you are young.  When you reach that age span you wonder where those years went.  Here is what Moses stated,

“Seventy years are given us!  And some may even live to eighty.  But even the best of these years are often emptiness and pain; soon they disappear, and we are gone” (Psalm 90:10 TLB).

There are a few who live past 100. We have a fine lady in the congregation that is 101 and will soon celebrate her 102nd birthday.  That’s quite an achievement in this day.  There is a tradition in the fifty states that anyone who reaches the age of one hundred receives a congratulatory letter from the President of the United States.  That is an honor for the birthday person and family.

Yet, living 100 years by itself isn’t much of a record.  If that’s all a person has to show for his years, he hasn’t accomplished much.  Whether a person lives into his teens or manages to squeak by that hundred-year mark, his life takes on significance only if Jesus was the author and finisher of his faith (Hebrews 12:1,2).  It isn’t how long you live, but who you lived for that counts.  Length without that life is folly.

“The fool has said in his heart, there is no God” (Psalms 14:1; 53:1 NKJV).

“A wise man is cautious and avoids danger; a fool plunges ahead with great confidence” (Proverbs 14:16 TLB).