What are the pictures hanging on the wall of your memory? An old farm house where you grew up, with purple clematis climbing a trellis on the side of the porch? A little child you loved more than life itself clambering onto a school bus for her first day at school? A path in the woods where bluebells and columbines lay like a carpet on every side? A favorite teacher standing at the board with a pointer in his hand? Life is a long, long hallway filled with such pictures, isn't it? The longer weʼve lived, the longer the hallway and the more pictures.
I've always liked the Chinese saying that it's important to make new memories. It is. When we stop making memories, we might as well go to sleep and not wake up, because life is essentially over. So why do we become content to live in the past, merely reviewing the pictures we already have and not trying to make new ones?
This really applies to our religious lives as well as to everything else. The spiritual life is a pilgrimage, which means that it keeps going right up to death and beyond. There ought to be pictures lining the walls of our memories all the way to the end. I like a man who tries hang gliding at 80, or a woman who learns to tango when she's so old that she has to take a Tylenol before doing it.
I want my life to be “full measure, pressed down, and running over,” because I think that's what Jesus meant when he said he had come in order that we might have life and have it more abundantly! |