As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“I began part one of ‘Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy?’ with data showing the apparently unprecedentedly high rate of unhappiness among young people in America…. I do believe that a loss of values and meaning are the two greatest sources of unhappiness.” - Dennis Prager
“Lately, hobbies have become a metric of personal success. But their core purpose is to help us pause and praise.” - Christianity Today
“The 21st century has given us great abundance and almost unlimited choices but a minimum of meaning. Again, Sacks writes: ‘Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power.’” - IFWE
“Despair is what results, and it’s what I heard beneath my neighbor’s lament. Such despair and empty moral imperatives also are on display in global protests over climate change.” - WORLD
At some point during my tenure as a pastor at Grace Baptist, I decided I needed a succinct, memorable expression of the gospel—a phrase I could repeat frequently in a variety of contexts until members of the flock would recall it reflexively.
What I came up with is pretty much straight from 1 Corinthians 15:1-4: The gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ died for sinners and rose again.
“A recent poll in the United Kingdom revealed that 89%—nearly 9 in 10—of young people, aged 16 to 29, ‘believe that their lives have no meaning or purpose.’ This saddening statistic is explained with a corresponding statistic shared in the same article—only 1% of this age group identifies as belonging to the Church of England…. In England, such attendance is down to less than 5%.” - AiG
“In The Doctor and the Soul Frankl described how many of his patients, looking for the meaning of their individual lives would end up in ‘ethical nihilism’ because they held that the goal of life was pleasure.” - Acton
“Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End is by David Gibson, minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland. It’s a poignant and powerful exposition of the message of Ecclesiastes.” - TGC
“As if living on a giant sphere spinning at 1,000 miles per hour, while orbiting around a gargantuan fireball at about 67,000 miles per hour, in a solar system that’s traveling around the Milky Way at over 500,000 miles per hour, while the galaxy itself is hurtling through space at more than 1.3 million miles per hour is just sort of ho-hum.” - Your Life Is Not Boring
A forgotten country cemetery sits atop a windswept hill not far down the gravel road from where my parents used to live. While living at home, my attention was always drawn in the opposite direction of that cemetery.
In the other direction was “town.” School, friends, athletic events, parades, concerts, restaurants, church—everything exciting was in that direction. But as the years passed and occasion afforded a brief visit home, my interests were strangely drawn toward that quiet graveyard. On occasion I would walk there and stroll among the tombstones.
Bordered by a shallow creek and cow pasture, nestled among a few gnarly trees, this little cemetery is one lonely place. I never saw another person there. There is no marquee, driveway or parking lot. No flowers, shrubs, benches, sidewalks or manicured lawn. Nor are there any impressive monuments—just simple, weathered tombstones rising in obscurity from the prairie grass. Some of the stones, as if too weary to stand any longer in their struggle against time, have been toppled over and rest on top of the graves they mark.
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