A little child, accompanying his father to a cemetery, noticed that on most gravestones were two dates separated by a hyphen. “Daddy,” he asked, “what’s the dash between the two numbers?” The father explained, “The first number represents the date when this person was born, and the second represents the date when he died. “Yes,” asks the little child, “but what’s the dash?” “Oh,” says the father, “That represents the person’s life.”
It’s disconcerting when you think of your life as a dash—a black mark of carbon on a piece of paper or a short line chiseled into a piece of granite. It also brings home the reality that life at its longest is pretty short. “What is your life?” asked James, the half-brother of Christ. The answer: “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”
Question: How are you living your dash? Satisfied with what is happening? Or would you like to have more between those two dates that someday will signify the length of your existence on Earth?
Some people are cynical when it comes to their lives. “Meaningless, meaningless…. everything is meaningless,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes, reflecting the cynicism that sinks like a fog over existence. Others, sometimes known as “existentialists,” say that life has meaning only as you create it. Their “dash” is only what they make of it.
So how does your dash—that is, your life—take on a meaning that takes it beyond the hyphen of two dates, whether they are on your grave marker or a biographical entry in a dictionary?
Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. James 4:14
The answer includes how you got here and what happens to you beyond your dash. OK, what does that mean? If you were created by God, the issue of purpose comes into the picture. Why are you here? And for what purpose did the Creator allow you to be born? George Gallup, the poll taker, says that the question of existence—what is your dash all about—is the number one issue with people today. It is little wonder that Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, has become a best-seller and is now translated into many languages.
The Bible says that you are not an accident, a chance happening, but a person created in the image of God. This means you are body, soul, and spirit—not a dash of black carbon, or a mark between two dates. And because of that, you need the element of God’s personal presence in your life which connects with the empty spot called a soul in your heart. When God fills that empty place, your dash takes on definition, purpose, and expectancy that goes far beyond the date at the end of your dash.
It’s disconcerting when you think of your life as a dash—a black mark of carbon on a piece of paper or a short line chiseled into a piece of granite.
If there should be an entry in a biographical dictionary in terms of the 21st century for Jesus Christ, it would probably read, “3 B.C.-30 A.D.” So, what does that mean? Allowing for errors in our calendar, Jesus would have been born about 3 B.C., and the dash of his life (the years He lived) would have ended about 30 A.D. But that event was only a mark like the knot on a sailor’s rope. It wasn’t the end.
Death could not claim Him, for three days later He rose from the grave. He told His friend Lazarus, “Because I live, you shall live also.”
Returning to that initial question, “How are you living your dash, that is, your life? Satisfied? Wishing there was more, feeling something is missing?” You can have a life of purpose when it includes God, who alone gives definition and purpose to life. Don’t be satisfied with a hyphen or a dash that is flat and empty. There is more. Find it for yourself.
Resource reading: Psalm 139:13-18.