The biggest problem in life is finding a meaning for it. A lot of us spend our lives distracted from pondering our eternal insignificance:
As children:We have a constant stream of immediate goals—proving ourselves mature enough to be left home alone, responsible enough to get a driver’s license, old enough to wear make-up or to shave
We struggle to acquire a driver’s license, a car, permission to date; to graduate from high school and attend college, to get a job, to get married, to have children. Then when the childhood come to an end, they consume every waking . At that point many of us suddenly find ourselves near the end of our lives with very little to show for it.
Looking back, our lives were filled with happenstance and short-range goals; suddenly even our spouses are strangers! It isn’t that our lives have suddenly become empty, it is that we have only now realized that our lives were empty all along, filled with distractions and happenstance, but devoid of any meaning or significance.
So we suffer a mid-life crisis, which consists of realizing only after half your life is gone that you never really began to live, that you squandered half your life on short-range goals and bad snap decisions that you cannot now undo.
What is the reason for this distress? Death. You see, no matter how much money you save up, someday you will die.
No matter how poor you are, someday you will die.
No matter how famous you become, someday you will die.
No matter how obscure you are, someday you will die.
No matter how chaste and pure you are, someday you will die.
No matter how well you live it up, someday you will die.
No matter how much power you have, someday you will die.
No matter how powerless and downtrodden you are, someday you will die.
It all comes down to that, doesn’t it?
Someday you will die. All the people who know you will die. Someday after that all the records of your existence will be lost and there will be no evidence that a person such as you ever existed.
Entire cultures, nations, and languages have been forgotten and lost in the sands of time: who can say that ours will not be one of them? It’s pretty distressing to think about it, so most of us bury ourselves in the concerns of our daily life to distract ourselves from the fact that we will someday die.
We whistle nervously down the path of life, we frantically immerse ourselves in activities. However, it doesn’t work: because finally, at some point in our lives, we may find ourselves in the same situation as my grandmother: very old, unable to see very well, unable to hear very well, unable to do very much with unsteady hands and fragile legs, but completely able to contemplate our mortality and the finality of our death.
The good news that the apostles brought to the world was that death is not the end. Sure, we will all die, but after that there will come a resurrection when God will judge us.
While in the past it may have seemed not to matter how we conducted our lives, it matters now, because even though we shall all die, it isn’t the end for us.
