| 2 Timothy 3:16 – “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, an for training in righteousness.” |
What’s important in life?
As a teenager, it may be something as silly as a new car or a dress to impress other girls.
As you grow older, your tastes may grow without the accompanying wisdom. The bigger house in the better neighborhood draws the attention of the young adult.
But those are empty things when you think about importance.
Ben Stein knows.
Stein is a deadpan comic who is actually an economist by training. His father served as the chief economic advisor to Richard Nixon.
Ben is best known for his role in the movie Ferris Buehller’s Day Off as the droll teacher who keeps calling roll with Buehller, Buehller, Buehller.
For many years, in addition to small acting roles, he hosted a talk show and wrote a column for the entertainment website EOnline. He knew Hollywood, but he also understood what life was about.
One of his final columns contained this:
Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails…. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordinance. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded….
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject….
Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.
We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.
I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin—or Martin Mull or Fred Willard—or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life….
I came to realize, that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others he has placed in my path.
When Jesus walked the earth, without asking the question he asked it–what’s most important?
He asked it of 12 men who were to leave it all to follow him.
He would ask it of a rich young man seeking moral perfection.
It is always a choice we must make–to choose what lasts over what is fashionable.
So, the question for today is one I want to leave you with. What is important in your life.
–Robert G. Taylor
robertgtaylor.com
