the list is life

Warren and I watched Schindler's List this past week, over a couple of nights. He had never seen it, and I hadn't seen it for several years. Every so often I'll watch The Passion of the Christ, or movies like Schindler's List, just to snap me back to reality, and more often then not I glean some wisdom from them and think on it for a while.

The list is life, they said. And for us that's also true - the list is life, and one day I'll hear my name read out of the book in which the list is written.

At the end of the film, Schindler looks at his possessions and sees what they are worth - not in dollars but in people he could have added to his list. He looks at his car and estimates how many he could have saved with that car...He takes off his lapel pin and says he could have saved two more people with the money he would have gotten from it. I've applied this to a few other things since I started meditating on it, one in particular. We've been praying about a decision we're making...a big decision, partially monetary but mostly spiritual. It will influence the future of a precious little person, and our faith is being tried through it. The conclusion that I've come to is that when I come to the end of my days, I don't want to be someone looking around at my possessions, calculating how many people I might have influenced with the money that purchased them. I don't want to trade the right thing for the comfortable thing. I don't want to lead a "priviledged" life, or give our children that same priviledge, if it means we'll have to sacrifice what we know to be most important.

If I'm old and gray and have pennies to my name, but can look at those I love and tell them I did all that I could to bring them to the feet of Jesus (with the prayer of their names being added to that precious list), then I'd say it's worth the trade.