Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Invest in Eternity

There’s a book I love called Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. It’s a true story about a retired sociology professor dying from ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), and his former student (Mitch Albom) visits him every Tuesday for lessons, not on dying but on living. Among the many wonderful aphorisms Morrie spouts is “Everybody knows they are going to die, but nobody believes it. . . . If we did, we would do things differently.” His point is that when we come to grips with our mortality, it changes our priorities and our attitudes.

Perhaps we could carry Morrie’s idea further to say that if we truly believe in eternity, it would profoundly affect our attitudes about this life.

We get awfully attached to this world and this life, don’t we? We “know” that this life and everything in it is temporal, but we act as if it will all last forever; we cling desperately to that which we can never hold onto. If we “believed” that everything here is impermanent—yes, even those relationships we hold so dear—we would hold them a bit more loosely and be far more “eternity minded,” making decisions about how we will invest our time and resources based on eternal values rather than worldly ones.

I rather like the following modern version of Matthew 6:19-21 from The Message: "Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it's safe from moth and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.”

Since heaven is our true home, let’s invest more in it than in this one.

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