One of the things that led me to surrender to missions was a reflection on how short life is in relation to how long eternity is.  It has been said that 50 years after you die, there will be no one left that will remember you.  Can you remember the name of your great, great, great grandfather?  How about even your great, great grandfather?  The reality is that we are all going to die and no one is going to remember us.  This is something that David reflected on as well in Psalm 39.  James tries to remind us of the frailty and brevity of life in James 4:13-16.   He says, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”  Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.  You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.  Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”  But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.”

The brevity of life reminds me that life is fragile and our time on earth is short, so it is critical to maximize our time so that we will not regret the life we lived.  When you die, there will be two dates on your tombstone, the date of your birth and the date of your death.  Between these two dates is a dash and what you do with that dash is what is important.  In the movie Gladiator, Maximus makes a profound statement, “What we do in life echoes in eternity”.

When I ponder what I should do with the dash, one option is to follow the popular path of the American Dream.  Work hard and save up a bunch of money until I reach a predefined age of retirement, then live in a retirement community in Florida.  The question then becomes, should we really follow the popular path?  In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus says, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.  For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”  Choosing to follow Jesus is the narrow path and the ways of the world are the wide path.

I’ve decided that comfort and following the world’s definition of success is not what I want to do with the dashes.  I intend to follow the narrow path and follow Jesus.  Following Jesus includes obeying His command in Matthew 28:19-20 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; an lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  This sure seems like a tall order and a huge commitment  but A.W. Tozer once said, “God is looking for people through whom he can do the impossible, what a pity we plan to do only the things we can do ourselves.”

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