Overload, information and otherwise

One thing that has become clearer for me in recent months is that there is a huge amount of stuff I don't have. I mean, there's not enough space here to list the stuff I don't possess or the services I can't consume. Even if I could buy half the stuff I don't have, there would still be mountains of stuff I wouldn't have. In fact, I could spend the rest of my life acquiring (on credit, of course) and still have that gnawing desire for more with me until the end.

The problem isn't the appetite, the problem is the food. Truth is, everything I can touch and smell and pay for is dying. The iPhone will be antique in a few years. So goes the ferrari. So goes the TV. I think intrisically we know this to be true. Our desire for new and different is really a veiled hope for something eternal and satisfying. We stand, as Jeremiah Burroughs said, with our mouths open facing into the wind and wonder why we're still hungry. The wind simply will not fill us. It shouldn't. That's not its purpose.

There is something that lasts and satisfies. It's in the face of the elderly lady who finds her humanity reaffirmed by a stranger in the time of life when society abandons her. It's in the tears of grief shared with someone who simply walks through rather than trying to fix the pain. It's in the heart of someone who gives up that which is dying to give totally and completely to that which lives on. It will never age. It will never break or crumble or be out-of-date. It has been the same from the first human breath until now. Society and its trappings have changed. Movements have risen an fallen. People of every age have been convinced that theirs is a fundamentally different world and people. Really, though, the only thing that matters will be - and will be forever.