epic first posts don't exist in my world

¹³Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." ¹⁴Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." ¹⁶As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins. (James4.13-17)

I like feeling important, and unless I'm the only moderately self-centered human bean out there, you probably know a little bit of what I'm talking about. It's fun to know that with your own two hands you can build towering lego creations, bake tasty tasty tasty desserts, rock some mean guitar solos, do funny ParentTrap-esque secret handshakes, and build churches from the ground up. But in terms of doing everything as our spiritual acts of worship, simply ending the processes with stacked blocks, or good cookies, or awesome music, or a beautiful, well-constructed house of worship misses the point pretty blatantly. We need to be the people that give all of that praise and all of the acclaim and all of the glory right back to God. We need to be the people that go "Thanks for the compliment, but hey, it wasn't me. It was... *finger pistols to the sky* ...the Big Man."or something along those lines. For me, that's where the disconnect occurs. There's something that gets in the way of me saying "Hey, it was God". For the most part it just seems a tad bit odd to me. Where was God when i was getting shovel blisters? Where was he when I was pouring myself out for His work? (momentarily disregard the selfish ignorance in the previous two questions). I know only a handful of people that are really good about pointing things back to God. Society says if you work hard, you get the praise. But does that mean that we are to follow convention and just soak up all of the glory? I think it's pretty clear that we're not to do so.

The point is that because God gives us the strength, we are able to do these great things. (Phil4.13). Even though we cannot see His physical presence, that is no evidence that He is not at work. We can only go so far alone. Even the greatest of motivators can leave anyone exhausted and spent.

I'd like to think to think that I'm going to be around to see my great-grandkids grow up, to give a "when i was your age" so epic that it would be perceived delirium (you used to drive cars?), to see all guitars become double-necked harp guitar/banjo fusions. But the fact is that I'm not. and unless you're some kind of scientific super-genius, you aren't either. (hopefully the banjo-guitars don't show up any time soon) Chances are high that if you're reading this blog-thing and if you've read up to this point that I think you're something special. Chances are just as high (or higher) that I legitimately care about you. and now don't get me wrong, caring is nice. :) but who will care about who I was or who you were a century from now? At the very least you or I will be a name on a slab of rock, with only a short line or two summarizing an entire existence. At the very best, we'll get our own chapters in history textbooks so APUSH or EHAP kids can have something more to groan about.

We're not permanent. We're anything but.

James says that life is "a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes," and in the grand scheme of things, we realistically don't have a fighting chance of being close to influential. But the thing I find amazing about our incomprehensibly mighty God is that He can use us (impermanent, fragile, overly sensitive, proud, lustful, and unloving as we are) as a part of His plan. That's very encouraging. And very frightening.

What is your life?

How are you living it?

-Spencer-