Seventeen years ago my brother Brett was a policeman in a rural, seaside village on the far east coast of New Zealand. He loved community policing. He regularly took the local lads fishing and diving, to get to know them, to encourage them to build relationships. During one excursion with the boys, Brett dived too deep and he couldn’t make it back to the surface. He left a wife and 3 young children. His birthday is on Wednesday.
How do you sum up a life in one paragraph? It isn’t possible, really. A life has such richness, depth, complexity and colour. A single paragraph cannot hope to express the way in which relationships are played out, how love came about, what it meant to be a parent, to have hopes and dreams, ambitions and careers, to experience success and failure, being part of a faith community.
Every life, no matter how brief, has its impact on the world. While some may be able to measure that impact by a significant contribution to the world of science, politics, education, agriculture, engineering or parenthood, it will always be only one measure of our worth as human beings. Our full humanity, in the end, can only be measured by the standard of the Great Commandment: to love God and one another. This is evidenced in the quality of our relationships with our families and those with whom we work and play. Beware of those who sum up the lives of others in single sentences or paragraphs. Our life picture is most beautiful when painted on a canvas prepared by a God who loves us totally and truly without condition.
No comments:
Post a Comment