This past month (month and a half haha whoops) I have been wrestling with this idea of how short this life is. Thank you Mary Young for reminding me of this fact as we were assigned to write our own eulogy for her class. Despite this assignment making me sad and slightly anxious, it made me realize a couple of things. The first is that, my internal life has just felt like an indie coming of age movie similar to Ladybird or Perks of Being A Wallflower, 10/10 would highly recommend. This feeling has spurred me to ask myself what does it look like to an adult? The next thing that I have thought about is what do I want my life to look like at the very end of my life. Will I have accomplished my dreams and hopes that I wrote in my eulogy? Every time I try to reflect and come up with a solution or some kind of 10 year plan, my thoughts end up becoming incredibly long drawn and convoluted to the point where I end up becoming more anxious than when I first began reflecting.
But then, I got to be reminded of a simple yet profound truth a couple weeks ago. We went through what it looks like to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with the LORD during the Micah 6:8 retreat. As we broke up into pieces, the speaker dove into what it looks like to walk humbly. In the 45 minutes, in which he shared amazing stories of redemption and beautiful reminders of who Jesus is to us, the one statement that I kept coming back to was this idea that our lives are simply not about us. We are but a vapor. We are potsherds among potsherds which fun fact are just broken useless shards of pottery. The Bible even says that we are surely just grass lol. What’s wild is that the guy who was saying this was the Ambassador-At-Large of Monitoring and Combatting Human Trafficking, and he was saying this about himself to us.
I say all this because it helped me put words to a lot of my thoughts in regards to what I want my life to look like. What if I leaned into this truth of my life not being about me and applied it to my everyday life and decisions? The pressure of me finding the perfect job would be relieved as I will learn to trust that the job I choose won’t be about advancing myself but rather about something much bigger. The difficulties in loving certain people will be hopefully made a little easier as I am reminded that loving people is supposed to be strenuous and hard at times as we give ourselves away. When conflicts arise, I’ll be able to actually listen to the hurt behind the argument rather than coming up with a logical rebuttal. This truth helps our pride to be in a constant check and in turn, giving more room for compassion to grow in our lives. What if looking like an adult is to be constantly living in this truth?
Life is not about me and that’s hard to swallow at times, but the reality is, we were designed to give ourselves away as Jesus did when He was on Earth. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That’s a pretty stark difference to what a lot of people want to say for their life purpose. Rather than asking what I want my legacy to be when I die, I should be asking what will the LORD do and what will His legacy be in my short lifetime.