Live Footloose & Fancy Free

I wrote up the final study for Pulse on Ecclesiastes.

Doing the prep for this study came at a really helpful time as my grandmother's health slowly deterioated. The reality of the the fragility of life, the decay that comes with age and the very temporary and short time we get on this earth - was actually a comfort and strong encouragement to keep on serving God with all the strength he gives me.

In Pulse, I got the youth to work out the imagery from Ch 12 of old age which is so honest and this is what we came up with - so real isn't it.




The year 11 and 12 girls really got stuck into it and I think partly when you are excited by truths you have discovered in the bible they too get excited, and I shared openly how hard it is to see someone you love deterioate like this passage describes, which I think my girls appreciated.

But as I said it was a great source of encourgement - reminding me to make the most of all that I have while I am young by remembering God who is the giver of life. The desire in our hearts is for his renown… for his fame…so continue to walk in response to his great love: to live is Christ, to be fruitful for the kindgom - for others sake.
Which reminds me of something Uncle John once 'told' me:

I will tell you what a tradgey is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the Fbruary 1998 edition of the Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement form their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Floroida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball, and collect shells.” At first when I read it, I thought it mike be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically this was the dream: Come to the end of you life – your one and only precisous, God-given life – and let the last great work of you life, before you give an account to you Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgement: “Look Lord, See my shells”. This is a tragedy. And people today are spending millions of dollars to pursuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t Buy it. Don’t Waste Your Life.

Don’t Waste Your Life :: John Piper