VANITY OF LIFE

From Ajala Kayode - Nigeria.

One Sunday morning, a wealthy man sat in his balcony enjoying the sunshine and his coffee when a little ant caught his eye; going from one side to the other side of the balcony, carrying a big leaf several times more than its size.

The man watched it for more than an hour. He saw that the ant faced many impediments during its journey, paused, took a diversion and then continued towards its destination.

At one point the tiny creature came across a crack in the floor. It paused for a little while, analyzed and then laid the huge leaf over the crack, walked over the leaf, picked the leaf on the other side then continued its journey.

The man was captivated by the cleverness of the ant, one of God’s tiniest creatures.

The incident left the man in awe and forced him to contemplate over the miracle of Creation. It showed the greatness of the Creator. Before his very eyes was this tiny creature of God, lacking in size yet equipped with a brain to analyze, contemplate, reason, explore, discover and overcome.

Along with all these capabilities, the man also noticed that this tiny creature shared some human shortcomings.

The man saw about an hour later that the creature had reached its destination – a tiny hole in the floor which was entrance to its underground dwelling.

At this point the ant’s shortcoming that it shared with man was revealed.

How could the ant carry the large leaf it carefully managed to its destination into the tiny hole? It simply couldn’t!

So the tiny creature, after all the painstaking and hard work and exercising great skills, overcoming all the difficulties along the way, just left behind the large leaf and went home empty-handed.

The ant had not thought about the end before it began its challenging journey and in the end the large leaf was nothing more than a burden to it.

The creature had no option, but to leave it behind, to reach its destination.

The man learned a great lesson that day. Isn’t that the truth about our lives?

We worry about our family, We worry about our job, We worry about how to earn more money, We worry about where we should live – 5 bedroom or 6 bedroom house. What kind of vehicle to buy – a Mercedes or Honda or BMW or a Porsche? What kind of dress to wear? All sorts of things, only to abandon all these things when we reach the entrance to our destination – {THE GRAVE} when we realize we cannot enter our destination with all these things.

We don’t realize in our life’s journey that these are just burdens that we are carrying with utmost care and fear of losing them, only to find that at the end, they are useless and we can’t take them with us.

The ONLY TREASURE that lasts FOREVER is; OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OUR CREATOR - GOD.

So ask yourself, "AM I USING MY WHOLE LIFE TO SERVE HIM?

May God guide us all and remove from our hearts the excessive love we have for this world. Amen.