The Dot and the Line - What Are You Living For?

It’s Friday night and all the cool shows are on TV – Run’s House, What Not To Wear…you’ve waited all week to see who’s going to make the cut on The Next Great American Band. So many choices!

When I was in college, MTV had just come on the scene with mostly, well, music videos! It was a huge distraction from what I was supposed to be doing, which was study. I was paying my own way through school; my parents were not around and my grandmother had raised me. We had absolutely no money for college, so I was at the mercy of scholarships, grants, and loans. It was not an easy time, and I welcomed any detour from the daily grind of class, work, study, and sleeeeeeeep (sometimes during class :)). At times I could barely see to the next hour, much less the next semester or, yowza – graduation!

I am an only child and our family was small; in fact both my parents were “only’s” too, so I have no aunts/uncles/cousins. When I was 8, my grandfather died and then my great aunt passed away a couple months later. They let me in to see the “viewing,” and I realized I was not shocked by death. Growing up Catholic, I already had a fair education in religion at an early age; I knew (and believed) in life after death and wondered how my life would count in God’s eyes. It was plain to me even then that death comes to us all; where we end up is a matter of how we’ve lived our lives while here.

After becoming a Christian I began to see life as being more than meets the eye. Life can be a dot, but when viewed through the eyes of God, it’s a LINE. In mathematics, there are an infinite number of dots on a line with no end. Eternity is the ultimate line with no end. Imagine life without the heartache of betrayal, sickness, conflict, worry, or death – this is eternal fellowship with God, absent of all the fallenness of our world today. Does it not make sense to invest your dot of a life here into the line of eternity, where the “returns” on your investment pay out forever?

So what are you living for today? Are you living for the DOT? Here are a few examples:

o Watching American Idol instead of going to a Bible study – all the time
o Spending $50 on a pair of shoes you don’t really need instead of giving to a needy family at Christmas
o Lying to a friend who really needs you, saying you’re too busy or too tired
o Worrying more about keeping up with the latest fashion trends than about how your words may affect the example you’re setting in front of others

Living for the LINE means:

o Not dining out with your friends for the umpteenth time, so you can take the money and give it to a ministry instead
o Getting up a little earlier to read your Bible instead of sleeping til the last minute before you need to get to class
o Spending time with a lonely elderly person in a nursing home instead of spending the day with your friends at the mall
o Sticking up for your Christian beliefs at the risk of being uncool

Living for the line is not always easy. In fact it is often hard and requires choices that might at times inconvenience us. But when we consider the example that Jesus set for us, dying a criminal’s death an innocent man in order for God to declare us “Not Guilty” in His court of law, how can we not respond with a view to eternity and make every moment of our “dots” count! The rewards are beyond our wildest imaginations.