The Fleeting and the Lasting

At the heart of human existence lies a fundamental choice: do we invest ourselves in what passes away, or in what endures? The Gospel of Luke 16: 9-13 speaks of this plainly. It tells us we cannot serve both wealth and God—we cannot love both the temporary and the eternal. Our lives ultimately reflect what we choose to love most.

The temporary includes everything that will not last: our money, our status, our possessions, our physical strength, even our ideologies and religious institutions. All of these will fade. The eternal, by contrast, encompasses what transcends time: compassion, mercy, truth, kindness, and genuine human connection.

We naturally become attached to temporary things. Some people, like the Buddha, awaken early and let go, beginning a journey towards what truly matters. Others only turn to the eternal when the temporary fails them—when success eludes them or when what they've built crumbles. Sometimes it takes loss to make us look beyond. St. Francis of Assisi who trusted in wars to be famous, had to return home as a loser and wounded from the battle between Assisi and Perugia to embrace peace—it is the same with a lot of saints and great people. It is like a stonecutter who trusted only his hammer. It was his single tool, and he believed it was all that mattered. One day, whilst working, the hammer broke. The stonecutter collapsed in despair, suddenly helpless, and thinking what is next.

This is the nature of the temporary—it will fail you eventually. Or rather, your trust in it will fail. You might delay this failure, perhaps until death itself, but it is inevitable. The temporary deceives you. Paradoxically, if you succeed completely in pursuing only temporary things, that success becomes your greatest failure, because you remain trapped in what cannot last. The temporary must fail; and the sooner the temporary fails the better it is for you.

But what about those of us who do possess temporary things—wealth, power, authority, talents, health? What should we do with them? The answer is simple: place the temporary in service of the eternal. The Gospel suggests we "make friends" with worldly wealth whilst we have it, so that when it fails, we might be welcomed into lasting homes (Luke 16: 9). Give when you can. Help others whilst you have the capacity. Protect those who need protection. For example, if you are a leader, you get to sit on a higher perch, when you sit on a higher perch than the rest and don't see any better, speak better, dan do better; then you become an object of ridicule.

Once we root ourselves in what is eternal, we can actually live with temporary things more gracefully. We hold them lightly, use them well, and let them go when the time comes. The choice between the fleeting and the lasting isn't about rejecting the world—it's about knowing what deserves our deepest love.

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