Vapors

"It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting,

for death is the destiny of every man;

the living should take this to heart."

Ecclesiastes 7:2

I've seen a lot of people die.  It's kind of part of the job.  A lot of times they are elderly, but often enough they aren't. There are certain things that unnerve me after someone has passed.  Things like the carefully applied eyeliner and eye shadow, or the trace of Cologne.  Things that say this person didn't expect to die today. They got up, they made their attempts to make themselves attractive to the world, because that still mattered, because they thought they had more time.  But they didn't.

We all know death is inevitable. That somehow, somewhere it will find us.  But it certainly doesn't feel that way.  The little inconveniences and frustrations of my day feel quite significant, because I feel like I will keep on going. But as one writer has said, "Men are like grass, and their glory like the flowers of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire."

Because we feel like death is far away and abstract, and that life will keep going as it has, we often put off things that really matter.  And put a lot of time and energy into things that don't matter at all.  I'm not one of the people that will tell you to have as much fun as you possibly can because tomorrow might be your last.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we are either here on purpose or on accident. If we are hear on purpose, the most important question we can ask is Who purposed us, and for what purpose?  Questions of this sort prick the back of our consciousness as we go about our daily business,  but often little real time or thought is put into the answer.  Because there will be plenty of time down the road to explore that question. Right?

Maybe we were raised in church and associate ourselves loosely with Christian faith, and intend to get back into it sometime. Later. When we've had some experiences and done what we wanted for a while, we'll start looking at that again.  But we are vapors.  Our physical lives are fragile and temporary.  If there is such a thing as spirit and eternity, we'd be wise not to neglect the part that will last while spending our time and gold on what will soon be dust.