My son Gavin said to me the other day, “Papa, I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up. I think I should either be a paleontologist or….maybe I should work at MOD pizza.” You ever have those silly moments with your kids that make you think? My first thought was, those are very different life directions!
Either way, it got me thinking that whatever we want to see happen in the future is dictated by a series of choices in the present.
It’s why we help our kids get to college, are concerned about who they are dating, why the habits they establish matter so much. They matter not just because of today, they matter because of tomorrow.
It’s this kind of perspective that the Bible takes not just about the immediate future, but our forever future. It’s this forever future that makes people worth so much. It is precisely because we are all designed to live forever – to bear the “weight of eternal glory” (2 Corinthians 4) that we must care for and nurture our relationships with everyone we come in contact with everyday. It can be a startling realization that there isn’t one person you will ever meet that will not last forever. The difference between where they spend that forever may be based on our influence in their lives.