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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The End of the World and Things

I finished watching Rolland Emmerich's 2012 last night. Overall pretty predictable for the end of the world movies that he puts out (although watching California slide into the ocean was sort of interesting).

It got me to thinking in this time of financial uncertainty and global earthquake instability about how we live our lives.

As you watched the pictures of Haiti or Chile over the last weeks, you saw pictures of complete destruction, pictures of people alive but with everything they owned buried under rubble. It's sobering as I sit here is my warm home, cup of coffee nearby, listening to the rain bubble down (from inside), surrounded by accouterments of living that one acquires having a wife and children, to think that all of this could inexplicable be beyond my reach by the time I get home from work today.

All the plans we make for the future, all the things we save for and save up, all can simply be immediately - and inexorably - change in the blink of an eye.

In light of that, how much time and energy do I put into these things?

Aye, there's the rub: pouring my time and life into things that in the end don't last and I can't truly control. Why is it that I am so reluctant to see that, or even to say that? Why is my first reaction so often "More, more"? Why is it that the things that are intangible - my family, my friends, my God - something that I don't view with the same sense of investment, the same sense of care and concern, the same sense of realizing that they are gifts which, by the grace of God, could be removed from my life at any time.

In Me, Myself, and Larry Phil Vischer quotes Henry Blackaby in saying "He who has something plus God is no better off than he who has God alone" - that things are not the addition to our lives that we so often think that they are.

What are you investing in today?

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