Old Car

Recently I stumbled across an interesting discovery. I walked up to the edge of an embankment out in a pasture and there, at the bottom of the embankment, was an old car.

Think about that. 

Once upon a time, this old car was a tremendous feat of human accomplishment. It was as sleek, powerful, comfortable, and cool as anything that people had ever made. It had been meticulously designed, engineered, produced, and marketed. Someone had handed over a lot of hard-earned money and proudly driven that car home and parked it in their driveway. Imagine their smile as they showed it off to their friends. 

And yet, the last time a human being paid any attention to that car, they were literally pushing it over a cliff just to get it out of their sight.

That's not uncommon. The country around us is littered with old houses and barns and cars and equipment that were once prized and valuable possessions, but are now junk. Isn’t it fascinating that today's treasures are destined to be tomorrow's trash? It's an old problem that people have struggled with for a long time. You work your whole life away to discover that nothing has really changed and your life hasn’t really seemed to matter.

The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is basically one long complaint about this particular oddity of life. In the first chapter, we read;

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
    “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
    it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
    and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
    by those who follow them.

-Ecclesiastes 1:9-11

It is sobering to think that right now we are spending today's effort on tomorrow's junk.

But as I think about that car at the bottom of the embankment and all that it represents, personally, I am not hopeless. I’m OK with the fact that life is bigger than me. I’m OK with the fact that my own great-great grand-kids probably won’t even know my name. I really am. 

What I am as I consider that old forgotten worthless car, is mindful. It makes me think. Specifically, it makes me think about what matters in life, and it challenges me to invest my life in those things.

And for me, I know what matters. God matters, and people matter. Those are the two things in life that are really worth investing in. And helping people get connected to God? For me, that's the best thing of all.

---