Last week some friends and I were up in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. This place is so remote that there are no roads in, you can only canoe to get where you want to go. We stayed on an island the first night. Pretty awesome stuff.
Depending on how far in you go, you may not see another human being the entire time you are up there. This means that your cell phone is completely useless.
No T.V.
No newspaper
No radio
No information whatsoever.
World War III could start and you would be utterly clueless.
When we got back to civilization, I was glued to a T.V. at Famous Dave's reading the ticker tape across the bottom of the screen to see what had been going on in the world for the last 5 days, and all of a sudden it occurred to me.......The World has gone on without us.
I know that sounds egotistical, but it really made me think about a couple of things.
1.) When Mother Teresa passed away, the World stopped.
2.) When Martin Luther King Jr. died, the World stopped.
These two people were just human like you and I. They possessed no special powers. They were just ordinary people who chose to live extraordinarily and when they were removed from the planet, it mattered to the whole planet.
So this is what I thought about on my way home from Famous Dave's....
Are my family and I living in such a way that there would be a void if we were gone?
1.) Would our neighbors be sad if we moved?
2.) Would our church feel a loss?
3.) Would our town be affected in any way?
4.) Our state?
5.) Our country?
6.) Our world?
If we are living the way Jesus calls us to live by loving our neighbors, putting others before ourselves, and being generous with what has been given to us, then there will be a void when you go.
If we can't answer yes to any of the questions above, then we need to examine how we are living.
Sooner or later we all get a toe tag. The question at that point is going to be:
Who is it going to matter to?
