As a child, I lived near the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico at different ages. One of my favorite things to do at the beach was building sandcastles. On many occasions, I remember hurrying to finish our sand fortresses in the afternoon as the high tide moved closer and closer to its walls. With the high tide came the knowledge that the waves would threaten to tear down our hard work and leave the sand exactly the same as it was before we started building. We tried all sorts of strategies to defeat the dreaded tides, from digging deep moats to installing tall and thick driftwood walls hoping to fortify my efforts through to the next morning. Of course, as a child I never understood that the tides are inevitable and that there was no engineering marvel available to me that could protect my sandcastle. As I got older, I stopped building sandcastles, or at least putting so much thought and effort into them. Why put so much work into something that would be gone so rapidly? In my middle age, I’ve recognized that there are all manner of sandcastle construction projects available to keep me entertained or at least busy during my lifetime. I look back at time I have wasted playing games on Facebook or arguing about something trivial or just bickering about nonsense with folks I care about and realized and recognize that those things are really just my adult sandcastles. This isn’t to say that entertainment in games doesn’t have value, but for me it’s too easy to lose track of time and waste hours a day on that sort of thing. In fact, most people waste more than 5 hours a day staring at a screen. Even more so with politics or holding grudges against folks or even working long hours. Today’s political outrage is tomorrow’s old news. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about such things, but the same energy invested in teaching my kids to be great human beings will live on long after high tide has washed me away altogether. Ministry and social work over the last 2 decades has taught me that making a difference in the lives of other people will always outlast my time with them. I have spoken to so many adults whose lives were changed by a teacher’s attention or a minister or a mentor, that it has become clear that aiming for something that makes those around me better can have a real lasting impact. I will never write a best seller or build a huge international ministry, but if I do God’s work where I am, I am laying the foundations of a structure that will last far longer than I will. This afternoon, I finished reading Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it, he talks about his time in concentration camps during World War 2. The purpose of the book is to highlight the truth that prisoners lived longer while they had hope or a purpose for living. Losing hope or purpose was often the final straw that led to a prisoner’s decline and passing. This doesn’t imply that they could survive anything as long as they had hope for the future. Rather, he discovered that seeing a larger purpose in the suffering changed how you endured it. Later, he talks about how the west will face a crisis rooted in our own tendency to enjoy comfort over purpose and meaning. This, he says, will lead to a constant shift from crisis to boredom and back. I can’t think of better description of so much of the world around me. We are always panicked about murder hornets or financial ruin or some other disaster destroying our lives. Otherwise, we are drifting from entertainment to entertainment. I would argue that both tendencies are the sandcastles we live for now. They never last, and we end up empty afterward. The cure to this way of living is to discover our purpose in life and live to build something better. I believe this is something we can only get from God. I also think the biggest danger is in not ever stopping to ask if we are actually helping to build monuments with our lives or just playing with sandcastles that will be gone before tomorrow morning comes.
