The Line Between

Have you ever looked at a tombstone?

If you have, you’ll have noticed that below the deceased person’s name, there are two dates. The year of their birth and the year of their death. What you’ve probably never noticed (and indeed I never did until a pastor at my church talked about it) is what’s between those dates.

There’s a line between the dates.

If you could travel to the future and see your own tombstone, you’d notice something. Between the year you were born, and the year you died, there’d be a dash, like this [-]. At first, it seems insignificant, until you think about it.

Your entire life is defined by this dash.

That little line in the middle of your tombstone will sum up the entirety of your life. It will account for everything you do while on Earth. Realizing this truly blew my mind.

What will you do in the line?

I know you’ve heard this before, but at the end of your life, you can’t take anything with you. The only thing that matters after you die is whether you put your faith in Jesus or not.

You spend years and years on earth, doing who knows what. But ultimately, the only things that matter are the things you did for the Kingdom. Your wealth, your accolades, your house, and your social media followers, will all fade away.

Everything is encompassed in the line.

Like when I talked about the Rope Illustration a few months back, everything you do in your life can be traced back to a single line. The question is: what will you do in that line?

You have a figurative inch here on earth, followed by an unending mile of rope in eternity. And what you do here, in the line between, influences everything.

What will people say about you?

In the end, there aren’t a lot of questions I can ask you that will have an eternal impact. But this is one of them: when you die, what will people see when they look at that tiny line on your tombstone?

Perhaps they’ll look at it and say, Well, they were a good person, but they really didn’t do anything beyond that. Or maybe they’ll look at it and say, Wow, they devoted their entire life to loving others and doing God’s work. They made the “line” count.

Quite often people like to use the phrase “This is where I draw the line”. But in the best possible sense we, as Christians, have no line. We should be stopping at nothing to make a difference. We need to make that line count, not because “we should”, but because Jesus asks us to and because our eternity depends on it.

What will your line signify?