More Than Existing by Dr. Juan Harrison

There is no practice life, no rehearsal.  We learn by the seat of our pants.  Parenting, marriage, grandparenting, caregiving, survivor – it’s all learn as we go.  We may seek advice humanly or spiritually, but we’re the ones in the arena.  Life happens.  Jonah had to survive inside the smelly fish’s belly.  Little David had to face a nine foot giant armed only with a rock.

Our lives are a blink of the eye in the face of eternity.  I watch people, especially as we age, who seem to want to sit out their turn in this world.  Others cover their lives with constant activity with little time for reflection on how we’re doing or what we’re accomplishing.

We watch people publicly or privately numb their feelings with substances and alcohol as they see life as something to endure until you can’t.  When the journey reaches hopelessness, the train will likely stop running right there on the track.

It’s hard to say what makes life worth living.  Believers say they live this life as a preparation for a better life in eternity.  Nonbelievers see this life as all there is and don’t worry that much about repercussions now or even for the decisions they’ve made or didn’t make.

Families continue to break up and children have less access to family time with adults showing and telling them how to live a life of quality and meaning.  Fewer examples of good decision-making are available as the old standards and norms we’ve lived by as a society disappear.

In all facets of our lives, parents and children are seeing a concerted effort by evil forces to dissolve all rules and guidelines to moral living and replace them with situation ethics of doing as we feel, not thinking, not considering, the ultimate effect of our actions on ourselves, our families, and others.

It’s not hard to imagine that our world is almost at a tipping point.  Us elderly ones have enough perspective to be able to have seen the rapid transformation of our society into something we hardly recognize.  When all our absolutes become “maybes,” then where does a world of floundering rowboats turn to for a lighthouse.  The Bible tells us when the salt has lost its savor, it’s no longer useful.  Here’s voicing a prayer for our children and grands to find that faith, that rudder, to help anchor them in this stormy sea.

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