Smoke on the Mountains

Read: James 4:13-17

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

                                                                                                                          James 4:14

     I have always enjoyed visiting the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. To see the old farms, the wildlife, and the majesty of the mountains together is an amazing thing. One of the beauties that has always impressed me is the way the “smoke” gathers to form an eerie mist that envelopes the mountains. I have taken pictures and, believe it or not, you can see ghosts in the mist. Just kidding! I have seen no ghosts. But I have always been struck by the fact that so much of the mountain can be covered in that mist and yet, it seems all you do is turn around, and it is gone.

     Our lives are just like that mist – here today and gone tomorrow. To us, our seventy or eighty year life span seems like a long time, but viewed through the lens of eternity, our lives are just a short blip on the screen. We could compare it to a speck of dust on a wall that goes as far as the eye can see in both directions. In other words, in light of eternity, we don’t have a very long time to make an eternal impact. When you are a young, person you feel as if you will live forever, but as you grow older, you will realize that there is a limit to the amount of time you have to serve God. 

     You don’t know when the appointed time is that God will call you Home. It could be when you are seventy or eighty, or it might be when you are seventeen or eighteen. It may be that God has only given you the time that you are a teenager in which to make your eternal impact before He calls you to be with Him. If all you have done through your teenage years is joke around, play video games, and watch movies, then what do you have to show for the time that He has given you to serve Him? The reality is that regardless of whether we die before we make it out of our teenage years or not, we will still give an account to God at the end of our lives for what we did with those teenage and young adult years.

     Have you ever put a pot of water on the stove and watched the steam waft from that pot? It doesn’t linger. It doesn’t float visibly through the air and then decide when it wants to disappear. It is here for a brief moment, and then it is gone. That is the same view we should have of life, and it should cause us to do everything we can right now to make our impact on eternity.

 

Quote of the day: “Only one life, ‘twill soon be passed; only what’s done for Christ will last.”