We are only a mist

When I was a senior in college I met and became friends with a graduate student who came to Mississippi State to get his masters degree. After I graduated in May of that year, I lost contact with him.

A few years later in May of 1967 I entered Air Force pilot training at Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma. In the middle of that summer I received a phone call from someone I didn’t know who was a friend of my friend from my college days. She informed me that he had been killed in a commercial plane crash and that his wife, whom I had never met or even knew about, asked her to call and inform me. He would have been about twenty-seven years old and I later learned that he had gotten his PhD degree in engineering and had a very promising career ahead of him. He had been married for about a year and his wife was five months pregnant when he died. A few weeks after that shocking phone call, we had a fatal T-38 crash at Vance that killed a student and instructor pilot.

All of these people had plans and were looking forward to long lives in which to pursue their goals. While there is nothing wrong with making temporal worldly plans, the reality is there are no guarantees that any worldly plans can be realized due to the uncertainty of life itself. The Bible points this out…………

(James 4:13-14 ESV) Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

However, there is one kind of planning for the future that cannot be shipwrecked by death or worldly events. While we are alive in this world we can make solid irrevocable plans for where we spend eternity. These plans are secure no matter what happens in this world of trouble and the Holy Bible gives us instructions on how to make these plans. The bottom line is …………

(Romans 6:23 ESV) For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

These are the only future plans that a person can count on. Have you made your plans for your future in eternity?