As I walked past a mechanic shop, I saw a well-built, athletic, and muscular young man attending to a car engine. I saw him again today. He was so happy, self-confident, ebullient, and effulgent with life. Immediately, I smiled as he reminded me of the joy of youth.
Merging myself into his life in deep thought, I imagined how young ladies will flatter and praise him for his appearance, how his friends might envy him, how hopeful he would be of the future, how he would trust in his strength…and how he would dream of a better life in the years to come… but I became sad again, for I wondered what will befall him 30-50 years from now…
I saw him losing his muscles as his skin began to wrinkle…I saw him burdened with care and worry over expensive bills and ceaseless troubles: medical bills, house rent/mortgage, car loans, kids fees, wife/girlfriend(s) allowance, parents’ allowance… what would tomorrow hold for many a youth today, I pondered as I wondered…
On poles by the road were posters of young women who had died in their 40s. One of them was of a woman who was only 47 years old. From her picture, she was a black beauty. My heart immediately went out to her husband and kids!! For I thought, she must have certainly left behind kids and a widower. Possibly, her parents might even be alive. Oh dear, how they must have cried over her demise.
I was so moved by the death of a mother…who will take care of her kids?…behold, her lips shall never know lipsticks again. Her dressmaker has lost a customer, her hair doer shan’t see her again. She lies motionless… in a few months, she will be bones…if she had large breasts and butts, curved hips, and sleepy eyes, with which she enticed men and prouded herself with…they’re all rotten. Gone and forgotten.
Of all creatures on earth, man is the most proud, blasphemous, wicked, and ungrateful…yet he is the most miserable. He labors for food, house, clothes, and transportation, only to age and die. Job was right:
“Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.”
If we would be minded of the shortness and vanities of the things of this life, we shan’t strive with all our might to acquire wealth.
Day in and day out, so many people die. And the death rate is only getting worse. We die, we perish. And sadly, our life span gets younger and younger. If our hope is only in this life, then we’re the most miserable of all. I wonder, as Solomon said, if animals are not better off than humans. Because of this awareness of the shortness and vanity of life, some take solace in reincarnation… others in atheism; they say, let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Others sell their souls to Satan. They make a covenant with death…and hope for life after death as ghosts or departed spirits…
When Jacob met Pharaoh, he asked him:
“How old art thou? and Jacob said unto Pharaoh, ‘The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an 100 and 30 years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been…” (Gen. 47:8-9)…
How long shall our lives here be and how shall we depart? Shall we depart by fire, flood, shooting, drowning, disease, accident…? We live in an unknown world…
Our only hope, is in an Unknown God…who has promised us a new and eternal life in an Unknown Heaven…may this Unknown God (Acts 17:22-31) watch over us for good.
