Do you live with finish lines?
I know I do.
As a small child, my most exciting finish line was Christmas morning.
As a student, summer holidays were the goal when the month of June seemed like it would never end.
As an adult, paying off car loans or mortgages were more finish lines.
You get the idea.
I suppose living with a finish line isn't a bad thing if it helps you to focus on your goals or at best, hang in there when the going gets tough.
However, a quote by C.S. Lewis jarred me into the realization that the playing field of life does not come with goal lines and yard markers.
Rather, the ball game, as my mother calls it, lasts forever and we should use our warm up time here well before being drafted into eternity.
Here's the quote from my new mentor that discusses the interesting implications of living life without a finish line.
"...there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were only going to live seventy years, (Lewis died at age 64) but which I had better bother about very seriously if am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be."
"And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment."
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