My friend Cori went to a retreat a while back on Ignatian Spirituality. Margaret Silf was a featured speaker and Cori picked up her book Roots and Wings, which Cori loaned to me a while back. It took a little for me to get into the book, but once I did I found it excellent. Great treatment of what it means to be human and to pursue our identity of God’s image-bearers. I recommend you pick up a copy.
I also want to share the following quote, which as I recall was the author’s recollection of a tv programme she watched featuring an “ordinary” woman doing extraordinary things here in one of the townships of South Africa. She was asked about the legacy she wanted to leave. Below are her response and Silf’s thoughts…
What would you like to leave behind as your legacy when you die?
She thought about the question for a few moments. Her answer took me by surprise: When I die, she said, I hope I will have spent everything I have. Another brief pause, then she added: When I meet my maker, I want to be empty-handed, because I want to have used up completely every gift God has given me. When I die I want to leave nothing behind, except a little footprint, that might help others find the way.
What a light and slender footprint that would be.
Jesus left no obvious or permanent “prints” behind. He wrote no books, achieved no academic status, created nothing of artistic value. He left us either a philosophy nor a theology. He established no new form of earthly government, and there are many who would say he established no new religion, no church, no organization, no hierarchy and no institution.
When he died he has spent everything he had, and he returned into eternal now having used up completely every gift that God had given him. Leaving only his spirit, and a slender pointer in the direction of life, he entrusted the ongoing evolution of the human family to a few men and women who had understood who he was and were willing to set out along the narrow path that leader to the future.
In sports, they talk about “leaving everything on the field.” At the end of the competition, you want to have given all you could, so that you have nothing left and will know you gave your all.
This is how I want my life to be. I hope that in the end, I look back with few regrets, knowing that I used and pursued all that God gave me. I don’t want to “store up my treasures where moth and rust destroy” (here and now) and hope to remind myself to not worry too much about tomorrow, for who knows what tomorrow may bring. Let’s ust focus on today. And this doesn’t mean we have to achieve all the “big things.” For most of us, its more about love in the “small things.”
May we all experience that full life Jesus came to model and empower us to live. Abundant life, every day.