15 September – Ben Cornell, Hope Church

Written in Sand

The stories of our lives are written in the sand and in the next tide or the next wind, are washed or blown away. This has been true for all people, always. It is why men of power build monuments to themselves. But even Ozymandias, King of Kings, could not keep his image from crumbling in the empty wasteland, so Percy Shelly tells us in his famous poem. But this is an incomplete picture, because in truth, the stories of our lives are written on God’s hands (Isiah 49:16), and for ink, it could be said, he uses his own blood.

For those who respond to him, who learn to love and trust him, the story is edited so that only the good bits remain. Our sin, our failure (to live up to God’s way), the bits that when seen by all in the light of day we might wish expunged, are expunged. God keeps no record of our wrong-doing. (Jeramiah 31:34). And neither does he leave us to be blown away by the wind as though we had never existed. He cherishes our uniqueness. The part of us that might ‘Rage against the dying of the Light’ as Dylan Thomas would have it, God holds onto. He keeps it safe. Not the pride that would assert its own importance, but the vulnerable person that the pride seeks to protect.

The point is that we don’t need to worry about our legacy, or build any kind of monument to ourselves, or worry that we will be forgotten, or believe that we are important enough to be remembered above anyone else. We just need to ‘…act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God’ (Micah 6:8) and know that in him our uniqueness finds a permanent home.