What Is Your Soul Worth?
Among college graduates (and many others, I’m sure), you would be hard pressed to find many who had absolutely no savings for the future. While college is no guarantee of success, it often provides additional future-oriented thinking in a person’s life, helping them deny some choices now to have something more valuable later.
All of us can relate. Have you ever read a great book from beginning to end? If it was great, the best feeling you had was probably when you finished it. When you started the book, you didn’t actually know if it was going to end well. And it was truly great, you likely wished you could read it for the first time again. You denied yourself something when you began the book because you believed that the payoff at the conclusion would be well worth your time.
Yet, many of us put little thought into what happens to the part of us that lives after death. It won’t surprise you that, as a Christian minister, I believe that every person you meet is immortal, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis. Each one of us is not destined to live 75 years and then our story ends. No, we live forever, somewhere. Our souls are far too deep, too personal, too transcendent for any of us to truly believe that this earth is all there is.
And this is why the Psalmist writes, “Preserve me, O God, for in you have I put my trust.” (Psalm 16:1, Coverdale translation) Trust for today, yes, but even more importantly, trust after death. The Psalmist is declaring his investment of his soul- he is banking on the God of the Bible!
So how much time is your soul worth?
How much time each year do you spend considering what will happen to immortal you after death?
You may even surprise yourself, becoming convinced of an unusual belief or believing something largely regional like Islam. But I am willing to bet that if you think about this question enough, you will eventually come to the question of Jesus- who was he? What does his life mean? Does he matter to me today?
My encouragement to you is that you think hard about what you believe. Talk to people you trust. Refuse to see religion as an earthly system and dig for the big questions underneath it all. Wrestle with it and ask tough questions. And decide that your soul matters enough to you to put in the work.
May God bless you on your journey.
Fr. Gavin Pate