“Come with me if you want to live,” is a well-known line from the Terminator movies. Various characters say it to offer a way out of danger. The implications are clear: come with me or stay here and die. Of course, the characters being rescued want to live. If they didn’t, the story would be over at that point. We can assume people generally want to live. We can’t assume they naturally want to come with a stranger or what they think is a killer android. In life, as in Hollywood Land, we must all weigh the dangers of the moment against the potential dangers of the future.
Yet, there is no certainty. “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves,” as Sarah Connor put it. In Back to the Future, Doc Brown tells Marty, “…your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it.” We all must decide, every moment of every day, whether to move on into the future or continue to live in the past or a precarious present.
Like Doc Brown, I like to think I can make my own future. I can choose to work hard, make little improvements each day, try to get along with other people, and be enthusiastic, or at least optimistic. To a certain extent, these choices have made and will continue to make a difference for me. But there’s not much I can do about other peoples’ choices. Most of those are way beyond my influence, much less my control. If a Russian president decides to invade a peaceful neighbor just to get the band back together, I can only hope and pray, and try not to get too excited about the price of gas.
Our futures are tied to people who don’t give a damn about us as well as people who truly need us. We are connected to people who want to tell us what to believe and people who look to us to set an example for them. What we choose to do with our lives may not affect some, but it seems to me, the little things we do might affect far more people than we know. Sometimes we get a glimpse.
Several years ago, when my son was on the debate team, I volunteered to judge several debate tournaments. After my son graduated, he took up the mantle as a judge. He shared an exchange he had with one of the debaters, who asked him if he was related to the Murray who judged the previous year. When he said I was his dad, the young man replied, “Tell your father he changed my life.” I couldn’t recall what I wrote on the evaluation form, but apparently whatever it was changed not only his methods of debate, but his ability to think about life in general. One never knows whose future they might change.
Two millennia ago, the teacher of all teachers repeatedly said, “follow me.” Again, the implications are clear: follow me if you want to learn how to be the best person you can be, if you want to do right by others, if you want to know God and serve him in spirit and truth, in short, follow me if you want to live. He was an example of kindness, love, and humility. Sometimes we miss his message because we are too busy complaining about our fate or just watching too many movies. Yet, his hand is always there, like a recurring scene in our lives. He offers it in the spirit of rescuing us from our past mistakes and present difficulties. Daily, we are offered the choice to stay as we are and perish or change our future by following his example.
MurrayWorks 