November 07, 2011
Epitaph
The owner of a local jewelry store passed away and his family had a
going-out-of-business sale, which included the inventory as well as the
furnishings and display cases. During the sale period I would walk past the
store, but rather than looking for bargains, my eyes were drawn to the
stenciled sign on the window that read ‘All Work Done on Premises’. I began to
think about the premises where each of us works - the jeweler in his store and
the believer in the world. A few days ago I walked past the store and the
lights were on, but for the first time the store was wall to wall empty. The
only thing remaining of the proprietor and his business was the gold painted
signage on the window. If the jeweler was a believer, the sign is a fitting
epitaph, because his work on earth is done. “…for
anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from
his.” (Heb 4:10 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I look around my place, and I see no end of my work. I’ll never get done what needs done before I die. And I think about the possibility that I could die on the way to the Post Office this afternoon. I haven’t finished helping my daughter through college, I haven’t answered all of my other daughter’s questions. And soon, her situation could very well need my help beyond just answering questions. And in my office are always several or more ongoing projects for clients. There is a small hand-full of people to whom I’ve been serving information about the Lord, bit by bit, sometimes by talking, sometimes by just doing things as right as I can. If my life were to slice off here, I would die with unfinished work.
-----But then, a man’s life is only a process. It is a process of loving, or not loving the Lord, a process of increasing good will among men and peace on earth, or a process of diminishing these. It is a process of working hard to generate some things people need for living and consuming some things others have generated, or of consuming what others have produced and generating nothing. It is a process of exchanging ideas and feelings with other people, slightly effecting who they are, which in turn slightly effects the ideas and feelings they exchange with others. And everyone is just a small process within the whole process of mankind from its creation to its end, like the wheels within the wheels Ezekial saw. Each individual’s process is sequenced into the whole of mankind’s by God timing it’s unique beginning and end. So all things happening in the process of our lives are precisely timed to make effects upon the whole of the human process which serves His specified purpose - the gospel of Jesus Christ, the vanquishing of evil, the proliferation of love.
-----Then, matter not how much junk I leave laying around my home as clutter, matter not how many jobs are left unfinished upon my desk, or how much help my daughter will need through college, or hugs for my wife through life, or answers my other daughter will miss, or statements I will not get to make about the Lord, when I die, the process of my life will have reached the fullness of the effect the Lord designed it to have upon the whole of the human process - His purpose. My work will have been complete. I will rest. Boy-howdy, will I rest! And so the same with the baby child which dies while yet in the womb and the 105 year old who rang the opening Wall Street bell on his 100th birthday, and who yet climbs those Wall Street steps to his clerical job.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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