The Gift of a Lifetime

Posted in , By Nick Smith 0 comments

Re-posted from August 8, 2011.

What would you do if you suddenly found $100,000?  Spend it?  Invest it?  Pay for college?
 
There was a movie made in 2005 called Reversal of Fortune in which filmmakers told a homeless man named Ted that they were making a movie on what homeless life was like.  Their true purpose, however, was hidden from Ted.  They placed a briefcase containing $100,000 inside a trash bin that they knew Ted would go through.  When he found the money he was quite excited, as you would expect.
 
What happened next, though, was something you probably would not expect.  Ted quickly got an apartment and bought a $30,000 car.  Then, he took a couple of his friends to the car dealership and bought them expensive cars too.  He wined and dined women, drank, smoked, partied, and in the end found himself right back where he started – broke and homeless.
 
Putting aside the morality of whether or not the filmmakers should have messed with Ted’s life in this way, this film holds an important lesson for all of us when looked at metaphorically.  Everyone, Christians and non-Christians alike, has been given a gift worth much more than $100,000 – the gift of life.  The choice we all face, just like the choice that Ted faced, is what to do with this gift.  Do we, like Ted, use it to pursue the American Dream of maximum pleasure for minimal effort, or do we invest in something far greater that will last much longer?  We all know what happens when this gift runs out, and for whatever reason we choose to ignore it.  We try to rationalize our choice to ignore in countless ways, but in the end we face a choice, do we live for today or do we live for tomorrow?
 
Imagine the Eiffel Tower when it was brand new.  Strong and pristine.  But imagine that every day a single woodpecker comes and pecks the tower a single time.  Then he flies away and doesn’t return again until the next day when the cycle repeats.  How long do you think it would take that one woodpecker to bring the Eiffel Tower down?  If he started when you were born, would he be done by the time you died?  It’s unlikely.  Yet even if you took the entire time it would take for the woodpecker to bring the tower down, and even if you waited even longer for the woodpecker to reduce the entire tower to dust, even all of those years, decades, centuries, and millennia would be just a blink of an eye when compared to eternity.
 
Eternity is coming whether we like it or not.  Have you chosen to use your gift to prepare for it or have you chosen to waste it away?  Make no mistake, the choice is there whether or not you act on it.  We will all have to face God when we die and explain that choice.  Are you satisfied with what you’ll have to say?
 
I leave you with this quote from Jesus from Matthew 6:19-21:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”