The Succinctness of Life

During my senior year of highschool I took a Creative Writing class (which for the most part I thoroughly enjoyed!) and one of the things we had to do was write "blog posts" through the school...and we had to do it almost every single day. Usually I'd just write fun family memories, random thoughts, something that I had been learning and occassionly I'd try my hand at poetry. Anyways...all of this writing resulted in a lot of saved documents on my laptop and now its fun to go and look through some of them from time to time. I'll probably end up using some of them on here again, but for now I thought I'd share these thoughts.

"I don't really know what made me think of this, but the illustration randomly popped in my mind this morning and I thought it was worth writing down. I remember thinking it was a wonderful illustration when I first saw it and then also found myself sharing it with others afterwards.

It was the summer before I was heading into the eighth grade and I was attending a week of camp at Servants Heart Camp Ministries. We were having Directors Hour (a time where the director of the camp would give a short challenge, using some sort of object to teach the lesson.) and Mr. Fry was leading the way down to the creek. A long string of teens followed behind as we headed down the winding trail. We finally reached the bank of the creek and spread around Mr. Fry, ready to pay attention to what he had to say. However, instead of speaking right away, he pulled a measuring tape out of his pocket and proceeded to measure about two feet of the bank right next to the water. He also pulled two ping-pong balls out of his other pocket before finally turning to look at us.

'Ok, I want you teens to look at this creek and imagine that the two feet I've just measured is your life. The rest of the creek is eternity.' He paused for a moment, watching for our reaction. We too waited, wondering where this was leading. He turned to face the creek. "I'm going to throw these two ping-pong balls into the creek and I want you to watch how quickly they pass through these two feet." He directed and we moved closer to get a better view.

With a quick toss, the ping-pong balls were in the water and on their way down the stream. The current picked the balls up easily and in a matter of seconds they had had passed through the span of two feet and were continuing to head further downstream. One of the other workers went to retrieve the balls, while Mr. Fry turned back to us, his face serious.

'Teens, I don't want you to forget what you've just seen. Our lives are short. You saw how quickly those two balls went through those two feet. The rest of that stream is long. Its the rest of eternity.' He paused again, searching the eyes of the teens before him. Then he continued, 'But teens, those two feet will affect the path that the rest of your eternity will take.'

It was all so simple. Just a little illustration that involved two ping-pong balls and some water, but it was enough to drive the point home. I distinctly remember walking away from there feeling very impressed with how short our lives really are and wanting to do everything in my power to make sure that my two feet and three seconds of life counted for something worthwhile."