It is strange how strong this drive to be successful is. The older I get, the stronger it becomes. I realize part of it is a desire for security. When it was just me, I had this confidence, perhaps a naïve confidence, that everything would be fine; that no matter what happened in my life or my career, I’d have everything I needed. But, I’ll tell you what, ever since Yvette, and then especially since Ryan, there is this new, ever-present, low-grade, underlying fear. For the first time I have all these “what ifs” running through my head. I want to make sure I’m good at what I do so that I will be indispensable, and my job will be secure. Money has become so much more important to me than it ever was before. I want to make sure I have enough of it to provide everything they need, and that I save enough, so if an emergency comes up, we’ll be okay. It’s really not a bad thing. In fact, it’s 1000 times worth it. For the first time in my life, I have things I am truly scared of losing. But I’d be lying if I said it was just about security. I also increasingly have this longing to do something significant with my life; to create or build something that will live on after I’m gone, something that even death won’t be able to take away. As crazy as this might sound, I find myself relating more and more these days to the guy who spent all his time building the barns. I think it’s about security, about gathering and building and creating, about wanting to be successful and to leave something behind.

It was just after my 40th birthday that I started realizing, “Give or take a few years, I’m about halfway through my life.” The clock is running, and before I know it, the game will be over. What at one time seemed like an entire eternity away is now oddly in view. I became hyper-aware of how fast this first half of my life has gone and how, every year, it just seems to be picking up speed. If everything up to this point has gone in a snap, how much faster will the second half go? There is no question—our one truly undisputable, non-renewable resource is time.

They say that the big thing that sets us apart from all the other animals is this awareness we have of our own impending death. It is our glory, our curse, our warning and our opportunity. It is such a major issue for us that it can drive us to despair if we are not careful. Often, our minds are so overwhelmed by it that they trick us into not facing it. It’s weird! We know, deep down, we are going to die, but we act as if we won’t. George Burns once said, “If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.” He made it to 100 and died that very same year! Plato said that the main goal of philosophy is to get us to take our death seriously, to have what he called “Melete Thanatou”—“Mindfulness of Death.” Ernst Becker in his book, Denial of Death, says that honestly facing our death is the biggest task we have in life. Ultimately, it shapes everything we do, and we will do some of the strangest things to try to beat it or pretend it is not going to happen. Yet, there is a shocking kind of clarity that the awareness of our death brings, that tends to put everything else in perspective. Lisa Rotgrak in her book, Death Warmed Over, tells the story of a man on hospice care, dying at home in his own bed. One afternoon he could smell the aroma of chocolate chip cookies, his absolute favorite, baking in the kitchen downstairs. He so badly wanted just one more cookie before he died. So he pulled himself out of bed, dragged his frail, withered body down the stairs and crawled into the kitchen. With a trembling hand he reached out to grasp one final cookie when he felt the sting of a spatula smack his hand. WHACK! “Put that back!” his wife yelled at him, “They’re for the funeral!”

I find it interesting that Jesus doesn’t call this man, the one building the barns, evil or wicked. He just calls him a fool. He had a lot of cookies, and he thought they were all his to enjoy anytime he wanted. “This is what I’ll do,” he says, “I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there, I will store all my grain and my goods.” One more barn. Onemore crop. One more cookie. Then, one night out comes the spatula and WHACK! “They’re not for you. They’re for the funeral!”

Look, we all want to gather and store, build and create. It’s natural. We want to do something meaningful with our lives. And we always want a way to measure our progress. Barns are easy to measure.

The problem is that all the things that easily lend themselves to being measured are usually the things that, ultimately, will not last. When we are in school it is our SATs, GPAs and class rank. Once we graduate it is salaries, promotions and titles, the size and location of our offices or our homes, the kind of cars we drive and the clubs to which we belong. It is easy to buy a baseball card with a player’s stats neatly printed on the back of a piece of cardboard, but they don’t make cards that measure the important things, like whether we were good parents or spouses or whether we were people of integrity who loved others, served our world and gave back to our community.

The sobering truth is that, ultimately, everything in our life can be put into one of two categories: eternal or temporary. Think about it. Everything you do, everything you own, every activity, every conversation can be neatly divided between those things that are just for now and those things that are going to last forever. I want you to try to imagine something. If I were to give you a fat pad of post-its and asked you to take a tour of your life, and if I asked you to put a “temporary” or “forever” post-it on everything, what would your mix look like? Go ahead and put a “temporary” sticky on the front door of your house, the hood of your car and that great dinner you had the other night. Put one on your checkbook, on your office door, the clothes in your closet and most of the activities on your calendar. And then, put a sticky marked “forever” on things like your family, your friends and yourself, on worship, on going down to the Habitat for Humanity house this month or other acts of service. Stick one on your mission trips and good conversations with friends and the times you spend with the people you love. Put another one on your boss, the stranger behind the counter, the presidential candidate you would hate to see win and the person who annoys you most here in our church. As John Ortberg puts it, “The day is coming when all our 401ks and bank statements will be irrelevant. The titles on our resumes will no longer impress anyone. No one will know what GPAs and SATs we had or what clothes hung in our closet or what cars sat in our garage. All that will be left is love and the things that we did for God and for others.”

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment in the entire Bible was, He said there were two of them and they both boiled down to the same thing: LOVE. Love God and love the people around you. Can I ask you a very personal question? Are you focused on the things that really matter? On the things that can actually last, that will last? If we were to collect all of your post-its and sort them into two piles, which pile would be bigger, the one that says “temporary” or the one that says “forever”?

In his extremely popular book, Half Time, Bob Buford, a very successful former president and CEO of a cable television company in Dallas, writes about getting to a point in life where he realizes that almost everything he was doing and working for was temporary. As a committed Christian, he knew what he believed, but he said that he had no idea what he planned to do about what he believed. And so, he made a bold move. He took some time off and got serious about asking himself some tough questions, such as: “Who am I and what do I really value? What kind of gifts, passions and convictions has God given me? Do my commitments match those convictions? Is my life in balance or am I missing things in my life, right now, that are important to me? What am I doing or not doing, right now, that could lead to deep regret later on?” And “Am I living out God’s calling or mission in my life?”

These are scary questions; the kind that most people will go through an entire lifetime without stopping or slowing down long enough to ask, and honestly, because they’re not sure they want to know the answers. They are too big to be quickly breezed through during the course of this sermon, which is why I put nine of them on a special hand-out inside your bulletin. I challenge you, I dare you to take them home with you. Pull them out when you have some time alone. Choose one or two and let them gnaw at your insides. Write your thoughts down in a journal or on a piece of paper. For Buford, asking these questions led him to the realization that he had been as successful and earned as much money as he was ever going to need. What he really needed was to spend the second half of his productive years doing something that would last forever, “moving from success to significance,” as he put it. For him, that meant leaving his business, going into ministry and writing a book to encourage other successful but unfulfilled businessmen to do the same.

I’ve told you about Rich Stearns, world famous CEO of Lenox, Inc., who, after reading Buford’s book, left Lenox and took 1/10th the salary to become president of WorldVision. Or Al Whittaker, CEO of Bristol-Myers International, who retired to begin “Opportunity International,” a Christian organization that gives microloans to women so that they can start small businesses in developing countries.

At the core of Buford’s challenge is this deep conviction that we are all spiritual beings and that each one of us has a God-given calling in life, a mission, that place where, as Frederich Beuchner puts it, “Our deep passion intersects the world’s deep need.” For some, their work is their mission. For others, their work itself isn’t their mission but becomes a vehicle to live out their calling. Still, for others, work is merely a way to bring home the bacon so that they can focus on their mission in their free time. And for many, they find their greatest mission after they retire.

Which brings me to my last and most important point: it is never too late to find your God-given mission in life; to start asking yourself the big questions, to take inventory on what in your life is forever and what is just temporary. In fact, often, the older you get the easier it becomes to make the adjustments you need to live the best half of your life, now. It’s never too late.

Actually, I take that back. There will come a time, for all of us, when it will be too late. Thomas Carlyle was a pretty famous Scottish essayist and historian who had been deeply devoted to his work; so much so that he ended up marrying his secretary, Jane Welsh, a very intelligent and attractive woman who continued on as his secretary even after they were married. Sometime after their marriage, Jane became ill though they didn’t know exactly what was wrong with her. Carlyle was so absorbed in his work that he hardly seemed to notice that she wasn’t feeling well and allowed her to continue working. It turned out to be cancer, and eventually, Jane was confined to her bed. Although Carlyle truly loved her, he was so caught up in his writing that he found that he did not have much time to stay with her or pay attention to her.

After several years, Jane died. There was a big storm on the day of her funeral, and after the service, they carried her coffin through the church yard in the rain and mud. Later, when Thomas returned to the house, it suddenly felt shatteringly empty. He went upstairs to Jane’s room and sat in the chair next to her bed, the chair where he had spent so little time during those years that she was sick. He saw her diary lying on the table next to her bed. He had never noticed it before. He picked it up, opened it and began to read. On one entire page she had written a single line, “Yesterday, he spent an hour with me. It was like heaven. I love him so!” That sentence hit him like a ton of bricks. Suddenly, what he hadn’t seen for years hit him with crushing clarity. He turned the page and read some more words. The man who crafted words for a living read these simple words that would break his heart and ruin him. “I have listened all day to hear his steps in the hall, but now it is late and I guess he won’t be coming today,” she had written.

He put the book down and ran out of the house. Friends finally found him, curled up in a ball, weeping uncontrollably, covered in mud, lying in a puddle at the foot of her grave. Thomas Carlyle lived another 15 years, but he never really wrote again.

Temporary. Eternal. There will come a time when the barns, the books, the essays, the cars, the house and the cookies will be left behind, and the only thing left will be that which we did for love. To which are you giving your life?

AMEN