… For All Eternity
About 2 weeks ago, my son and I hiked 84 miles on the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut and Massachusetts. We’ve been hiking on the AT for years now (mostly in the southern States) so this was nothing new; however, what struck me was how the forest and meadows were absolutely filled with stone walls. Stones of various shapes and sizes piled about thigh-high with splotches of lichen and spongy moss; most of the stones are what you might call “two-handers”, light enough to lift, but really you need two hands to move them around. Of course, the question in my mind (being an Enneagram 5) was “why?” and “who?” For several days as we crisscrossed the mountain range, I kept pondering aloud questions about these stone walls with my son to the point where Q said, “Dad, you are obsessed with these stone walls.” He was right. I just couldn’t get out of my head who these people were and why they thought creating these walls was so important. Furthermore, now 250 years later, these stone walls largely lie in ruin, serving little to no function or purpose. I later learned that there are more than 100,000 miles of these stone walls around New England, built with roughly 400 million tons of stone. That’s enough to circle the earth four times over! And I wondered, “would they have built those walls back then knowing that in the future all their efforts would slowly fall into disrepair as the forest would reclaim these stones?”
For me, the nagging question is: is this a metaphor for the lives that we live? Are we building today what will fall into disrepair tomorrow? Or more pointedly, is my life as meaningless as moving a pile of rocks from point A to point B, only to have time and entropy move the rocks back to point A? Of course, most of us don’t fill our lives literally moving rocks around, but consider substituting rocks for those daily tasks, chores, and activities that have nothing more than short-term implications. In other words, what are we doing today that WON’T be gone in 10 years? In 100 years? In 1,000 years? In 10,000 years? The Apostle Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 4, that we CAN spend our days building something that will last at least this long. He writes, “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” In other words, when we invest in the lives of others around us – to help them grow as followers of Jesus Christ – our work will never be in vain. According to God’s promises in the Bible, it will literally last forever.
This is why at Faith Lutheran, we have made discipleship in Jesus Christ the focal point of our mission statement – that we ourselves would become growing followers of Jesus and that we would invest our time and resources in helping others to become growing followers of Jesus. To put it simply, “We are growing disciples who grow disciples.” And while we still need to pile a few rocks along the way in life for short-term benefits (even necessities), we refuse to allow this rock-piling to distract us from what’s truly important… committed disciples of Jesus Christ for all eternity. I’m grateful for your partnership as we grow and serve together. And still I wonder, how can we do better? Amen.
Pastor Brian Goke
08/25/2020