The Picture on the Front of the Box

What's yours?

What is the "picture on the front of (your) box"?  Everyone has one.  What's yours?

Why do you do what you do?  Why school?  Why climb the ladder?  Why marriage, or a family...or singleness?  Why build the portfolio, travel, experience life?  Why anything?   Why...it begins the most important questions in life, and demands life's best answer.

When my kids were small, Pamela and I would buy things for them "some assembly required."  Most times the assembly became an adventure (given my lack of mechanical skills).   Invariably, I'd get into the middle of assembling a toy or a bike and something wasn't going according to the "some assembly required" instructions.  Helpful quite often was to look at the picture on the front of the box in which everything had been packaged--the front photo of what the project should look like if the instructions were carefully followed.  The big picture would often reveal that I was trying to put together two parts that were not meant to be put together, or some such mistake.  Every now and then, in the process where it is quite easy to get things wrong or out of order, the big picture was the key to final success -- the joy of my kids using the new toy.

All of us are in some kind of "some assembly required" process.  Sure you are.  Generally, we call it life, but virtually every one of us wants that life to look like there is some purposeful design to it.  The unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates).  The outcomes of life are too important, the stakes are too high, simply to force-fit parts of it wrongly together.  Such a living just goes badly and ends the same way.

So what big-picture do you refer to now and then, especially when you get stuck or befuddled, to start putting the pieces together rightly again?

I would contend that it is a life lost, given up, spent for the sake of the gospel (cf. Jesus' words at the end of Mark 8).  A life in which Christ -- the Greatest Person in all of Reality and Life -- is central.  A life where Jesus is everything to you, and is given His rightful place in putting all the pieces of your unique life together in a purposeful, beautiful, and rightly working way.  He is to have, Scripture insists, first place in everything.

That was my word, a 2nd Wednesday night running, to our First EFC HS Seniors last night.  Best expressed in a song by Sara Groves, "This Journey is My Own" (album Conversations).