Showing posts with label spiritual. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiritual. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

What Will Matter?

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.
There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days.
All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten will pass to someone else.
Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.
It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.
Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.
So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and "to do" lists will expire.
The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
It won't matter where you came from, or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end.
It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.
Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
So what will matter?
How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought but what you built, not what you got but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught.
What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.
What will matter is not your competence but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel lasting loss when you're gone.
What will matter is not your memories but the memories that live in those who loved you.
What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.
Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident.
It's not a matter of circumstance, but of choice.
Choose to live a life that matters.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

The Physical & The Spiritual

“There aren’t two worlds – the physical and the spiritual -- there is only one: God’s Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven. Many of us pray, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven,’ thinking that God is up there, which creates the duality of the two worlds. A lot of people in the West like to keep matter and the spirit very comfortably and conveniently apart. All truth is one, all reality is one. As soon as we take the enfleshment of God, the incarnation which, for Christians, is represented by the person of Jesus Christ, then we start taking things seriously.” – Father Bert White


-- from Mother Teresa – A Simple Path