| James 5:13-15 – “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit: – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”” |
Most stories have three parts: a beginning, a middle and an end. That is typically what you hear when I tell you a story.
But there’s one story, even though it has an end, you don’t know what that end is…yet.
One of my favorite writers is Malcolm Gladwell. He tells a story of something that was incomplete.
He said he was researching an article, and he ran across a reference to a problem in Canada.
It seemed that there was a particular juvenile facility that boys kept running away from.
The question was “what caused them to run away?”
An investigation was launched. A particular investigator was assigned to the case, and he started trying to trace down.
He started checking possible reasons and then he would eliminate them.
Was it personality? No, pretty much the same kind of boys were in other schools, so their personality did not account for the reason.
Perhaps it was the school created a condition that made for runaways.
After investigating, the facility was like all the others.
The staff had been in other places that did not have the problem of runaways.
It seemed that the context the boys were in was not the reason.
He kept reading. Gladwell said it was a long paper. As he read it, and it seemed like there were dead ends, he turned a page and discovered the investigator had been reassigned to a new task and never got back to the research.
Gladwell said he was frustrated. He wanted the story tied up with a nice little bow, but he was left hanging. He did not know how it ended. And, if you are expecting me to solve it, you are out of luck as well.
You know another story that has an ending we don’t know? If you look at your face in the mirror, you will see it. It is the story of your life.
We come to live today with a past and a present but a hazy future.
It was something that God wants us to remember. James told his audience so fond of wanting to tie up their lives in nice bows that they could not do that.
“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”” (James 4:13–15)
“If the Lord wills” is not a magic phrase. But it does acknowledge that only one knows how the story of our lives end. We live for today and let God take care of the tomorrow. The end he chooses is what will be best…and it may be unexpected.
So, live your life today knowing you do not know the end of your own story.
–Robert G. Taylor
robertgtaylor.com
