Jan. 12, 2004 issue
Words of life: Don't lose heart
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People enter a new year seeking security, meaning and happiness. Fear, discontent and violence surround them. What can point the way to a better life?
Words of truth and wisdom are what we need. Enduring words, not ones lost in the world’s din of voices.
We need solid words, from a reliable source. But who knows whom to trust? Who knows which advice to follow?
The Christian has an answer. We have felt, we have experienced, that there is more to life than meets the eye.
We have embraced the testimony of others who make this claim. Their words, collected in Scripture, ring true to us. We trust the source. We believe that the God who inspired the words shows the true way of life and love.
Hear the words and live them, we say to ourselves and to the world.
These are the words of one messenger of truth: “Do not lose heart.” The messenger, Paul, had seen the risen Christ. This was enough to get him through any trial.
For emphasis, he says it twice: “Do not lose heart” (II Cor. 4:1 and 16.) His words pour encouragement into the empty cup of a new year.
One year’s dawn and another’s end call our attention to time’s passage. Our lives, Paul reminds us, are journeys to death: “For we who are alive are always being given over to death” (4:11). But then he adds that this is “for Jesus sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. ”
Our bodies, each day a step closer to death, are vessels of life. And not just our own. In one of Paul’s most wonderful images, he says we have “treasure in jars of clay” (4:7). The clay jar is our body, declining inevitably. The treasure is the gospel, living forever.
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