WE’RE NOT JUST MOVING THE PILE

What people sometimes say to bring consolation in times of crisis, I find not consoling but depressing. In times of reversal, failure, and crisis, someone, trying to be a comfort by giving perspective will say, “Think of it this way; it won’t matter a hundred years from now anyway.” That is a true axiom about so much that we obsess about. In a hundred years it won’t matter if in high school you were voted most popular or not. It won’t matter one year from now. In a hundred years it won’t matter whether you drove a sports car or not. Or whether your team won the championship. Or whether you made a six-figure income. Or whether you were turned down when asking for a date. The depressing thing about “It won’t matter a hundred years from now” is that it strikes at our need for significance. We have a strong need to say, be, do, something that matters. It’s when our lives, our person, our works, our endeavors, our loves matter that we have a sense of significance, that our lives have meaning. Years ago, I read an account of a survivor of a concentration camp. He recounted how the Nazi SS would force the hunger-weakened victims to do hard labor. On one side of the camp was a huge pile of garbage. One morning, the guards forced a detail of men to shovel and wheelbarrow the colossal mound of waste and garbage to the opposite side of the camp. The next morning, the guards forced the same detail to move the pile back to its original location. The third, morning, the men were forced to move the mound again to the opposite side of camp. Day after day. Back and forth. One morning, one man threw down his shovel and went stark-raving crazy. He snapped. He became completely disillusionly mentally ill. The survivor noted that it was not the repugnancy of the dump, or the harshness of the labor, or the weakness of body, or the abuse of the guards that drove the man (and others) to insanity. It was the being forced day after day to do a task that had absolutely no purpose, fulfilled no goal, accomplished nothing. The men were asked to expend themselves in something that did not matter. If honest, we can come to the place in life, especially when it’s hard or boring, where we feel we are but moving the pile from side to side—never really accomplishing anything. Never really doing anything that matters. What matters is what lasts. Sometimes we look at Scripture all wrong. I feel the key to a meaningful, peaceful, and successful life is tied up in Jesus’ injunction to “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God…” (Matt. 6:33). Yet, often we tend to see this and Scriptures like this—though we may never articulate or voice it—as something God demands because it somehow does something for Him. “Seek ye first…” is not just a petulant, puerile, request of a narcissistic God seeking to get us to do something for Him. It is not an arbitrary, purposeless assignment of busy-work as moving the pile from side to side was. No. “Seek ye first…” is the means of making life matter. What’s done for the Kingdom is never erased, forgotten, meaningless, purposeless. What’s done, invested, sought, in the Kingdom will continue to matter a hundred years from now. A thousand years from now. An eternity from now. Too many’s responses to the “It does not matter…” is either glib denial or depressing nihilism. Either way, most of these seek to numb the reality that nothing matters with momentary pleasures, intoxications, etc. These things only further reinforce the sense that nothing matters. I am out of room and time to elucidate, but the Apostle John captures what I am trying to say in three short verses: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” (1Jn 2:15-17). Living for God will matter a hundred years from now. That gives meaning and purpose right now, right here. That’s anything but depressing. We are not moving the pile from side to side. We are laying up treasures in heaven.

WE’RE NOT JUST MOVING THE PILE

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