Significance

A tombstone in Tombstone, Arizona (no kidding) reads:

“Here lies Lester Moore,
Four slugs from a 44
No less, No more”

Now isn’t that one of our fears? That we would be here, gone and nothing but a joke would remain. We laugh about that, but in reality, we want our lives to have had some significance when we are gone. If we are honest, there are many reading this blog who feel the years remaining to make a difference slipping away. I am 50 years old! Tell me about it!

The purpose of this blog is to give you some good and hopeful news. First a little background.

In the mid 90s, while in my doctoral studies, I took a course in human development. I expected it to be a good class. Boy was I wrong. It was incredible. In many respects it rocked my world. The field of study in human development is actually a relatively young field as far as fields of study in sociology are concerned. Human development studies in many respects followed the Baby Boomer generation. You can trace the origin of many Christian ministries back to the era when many of these studies were conducted.

Primary studies were done originally on children and adolescents or the ages from birth to 18. It was later changed to the age of 22. The reason there was a lot of time, money and energy spent on these ages was that the overriding belief was that these were the years when individuals change. This is true physically. Which of us has not had a niece or nephew we have not seen in some time and said, “My how you have changed!” It is outside and visible. We can see the changes clearly. The incorrect assumption was that the internal changes paralleled the external. We used to believe that the IQ peaked at age 18. (Later this was changed to age 22 as I said.) So we crammed 11,000 hours of education into them. We were trying to get them while they were hot. Churches bought into the same thing.

After sociologists had studied children and teens, they decided to study adults. After all that is all that was left, but we knew the changes were minimal, because you did not see much change on the outside. A good phrase for adult social development during this pre-study time frame would be “smooth sailing.” You are stable now. That is how we used to teach it. We now know that is no longer true.

What they found was alarming. In reality, the adult learner usually learns more and does better. A major reason for this was that the adult has life experience into which they can assimilate and/or filter the information. How many of us know adults who went back to school and were the best student in their class? Adults are going through more changes than we ever thought possible. It is just not visible like it is with a child. It is internal, emotional, mental and spiritual.

There were two key pieces of information that came from the studies.

1. Your peak years of productivity do not hit until around 45!

2. What you will contribute to society, your legacy as it were, you do not even begin until you are beyond 45!

Did you read that correctly? Yes, you did. Read it again. Your key life contributions do not begin until you are beyond the age of 45. Some of you should feel very hopeful about now.

As you read that, we must remember we live in an age of the anomaly. We live in the era of entertainment and athletics where there are many high profile folks getting famous while young and beautiful or in their athletic prime. These folks live off that glory the remainder of their life. Many spend thousands of dollars in cosmetic surgery trying to keep that youthful look. But these folks are by far the exception, both in our day and in human history in general. We will always have the Alexander the Greats who did everything in less than 35 years. But for most of us, that just is not the case. Most of us spend the first half of our life preparing for what we ultimately will accomplish.

That leads me to a couple quick comments:

You have a purpose. You, my friend, are no accident! The first word after God’s creation of you was not, “Oops!” Do you know your life’s mission? Work at it. If not, determine it and invest your life in it.

Do not give up. It is never too late! Ben Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington Carver, Abraham Lincoln, Lee Iacocca, Martin Luther King, Jr. and on and on the list goes kept at it until they succeeded in their legacy.

God is not through with you. Are you breathing? Good. Take another breath and remember God is not through with you yet! Roll up your sleeves, determine what you should be about and be about it!

You have significance. There is only one you. There is a contribution to humanity that only you can make, no one else can make it.

So, let’s get on with it!