The Inevitable Question

(Especially for 20 and 30-somethings) -------------- It happens to everyone. Everyone. It typically creeps into our thoughts in our sixties. For some, it’s a little sooner. For others, it happens in our early seventies. But it always happens. We look back at our lives and ask the inevitable question: “What was my life worth?” That’s what Jeff said to me. He’s my age – late 60s. Financially secure, lives in a nice home in a New York suburb, has practiced medicine, and now works part time as an educator at a local university. To look at him, even to talk briefly with him, he seems to have it all together. We spoke on the phone last night. I caught him in one of his now frequent self-reflective moments. His voice broke as he asked – more of himself than of me – “What’s my life been worth?” I’ve often asked my students how long it is between the age of 35 and 65. They’d hesitate a moment, wondering if it was a trick question, and then answer, ‘Thirty years.” In a way, it was a trick question. The answer is not thirty years. The answer is “Three weeks.” Virtually everyone older than forty can think back twenty or thirty years to some significant event in their past – and when you ask them how long ago that seems to be, most will tell you . . . . Yes. “Only a few weeks.” What’s my point? Shakespear’s Macbeth tells us: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Scripture says it even better: “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.” (James 4:14) Listen! In just a few weeks, you will be asking yourself, “What has my life been worth?” I want to share with you an impeccable truth, an ageless truth, a trans-cultural truth: Only to the extent that you have served Jesus will you have a comforting answer to that inevitable question. Please. Pay attention. Your next forty years will pass like a snap of the fingers.