Warren Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies. He has been extremely benevolent over the years, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable causes. Forbes estimates his net worth at $1141 billion dollars. My net worth is several zeroes less.

Who, then, am I to disagree with the famed “Oracle of Omaha” when he gives advice?

The ninety-two-year-old was asked at Berkshire’s recent annual shareholder meeting how to avoid mistakes in business and in life. His response: “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it. It’s not that complicated.”

With all due respect to Mr. Buffett, it is. Or at least, it should be.

We can “write our obituary” without God’s help and, depending on what we choose to write, “figure out how to live up to it.” Or we can seek God’s best for our lives, knowing that we must then have his power if we are to fulfill his purpose.

There is an eternally significant chasm between these two options.

Almost a third of high-school girls considered suicide in 2021

Western secularism has been trying for generations to follow the path of self-reliance. As American playwright Tennessee Williams observed, “Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”

How is our “magic trick” working for us?

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that mental health-related visits to emergency rooms by children, teenagers, and young adults have risen sharply in recent years. The worst escalation was for suicide-related visits, which increased fivefold.

According to recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly a third of female high-school students said they considered suicide in 2021. Nearly 60 percent said they felt sad or hopeless—the highest number in a decade. Depression became more common among young people across the past decade; in 2015, the suicide rate among teenage girls hit a forty-year high.

New York Times opinion columnist David French reminds us that politics cannot fix our deepest problems, such as pervasive loneliness, the crises of suicide and drug overdoses, and our yearning to love and be loved. The WHO can end its emergency declaration for COVID-19, but as Wall Street Journal writers Betsy McKay and Brianna Abbott note, “The pandemic has shattered an illusion that humanity has control over its environment.”

Rather that writing our own obituary and trying to live up to it, what if we allowed God to define our life mission and then partnered with him in fulfilling it? How would we do this?

One: Admit your need for divine grace

Our first step into such a life of empowered purpose is to admit our need for what only God can do in our lives. Billy Graham wrote: “Why can’t we live together in peace? The reason is that our hearts are selfish and filled with anger and greed and a lust for power. Until our hearts are changed, we will never know lasting peace.

“Tragically, we are a planet in rebellion against God. That is why the world’s greatest need is to turn to Christ. Only he can change us from within by his Holy Spirit. But even when wars rage, we can have peace in our heart as we open our life to Christ. Ask God to give you that peace—and pray that others will know it, too.”

Take a moment now to ask God to guide your life and your day into his peace for you. Pray for his Spirit to control and empower you as you step into his best (Ephesians 5:18).

Two: Partner persistently with God

St. Augustine noted that before we became Christians, it was not possible for us not to sin. Now it is: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions” (Romans 6:12). God’s Spirit will help us, but we must want the holiness he empowers us to experience.

Paul asked regarding sin, “What fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?” (v. 21). Remember that because Satan hates us, temptation must always cost more than it pays. Charles Spurgeon’s advice is relevant here: “When thou sleepest, think that thou art resting on the battlefield; when thou walkest, suspect an ambush in every hedge.”

One of Satan’s subtle strategies is to suggest that the persistence of temptation means it cannot be defeated. This is not true. Paul testified, “I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand” (Romans 7:21), yet he also stated, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). After Jesus’ victory, the devil “departed from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13), but he remained sinless (Hebrews 4:15). Persistence is vital to godliness.

Three: Live today for eternity

Today is the only day there is: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring” (Proverbs 27:1). It is not “carpe diem” (“seize the day”) but “cedere diem” (“yield the day”) to God (cf. Matthew 11:29).

Live this day fully for the sake of eternity, remembering that every act of obedience on earth echoes in heaven (cf. Matthew 16:27).

“An endless day that knows no night”

St. Maximus of Turin (ca. 380–465) noted in a sermon: “The light of Christ is an endless day that knows no night.” As a result, “The coming of Christ’s light puts Satan’s darkness to flight, leaving no place for any shadow of sin. His everlasting radiance dispels the dark clouds of the past and checks the hidden growth of vice.”

St. Maximus then likened Christ’s glory in heaven to his power on earth: “The celestial day is perpetually bright and shining with brilliant light; clouds can never darken its skies. In the same way, the light of Christ is eternally glowing with luminous radiance and can never be extinguished by the darkness of sin.”

Will you walk in “the light of Christ” today?

Denison Forum

The world was focused last Saturday on the tradition-steeped coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla, and sports fans were watching fifteen-to-one longshot Mage rally from the back of the pack to win the Kentucky Derby. Meanwhile, those of us who live in North Texas were horrified as another mass shooting erupted, this time in our backyard.

A gunman opened fire at the Allen Premium Outlets Saturday afternoon, killing six people at the mall and injuring at least nine others. Of the nine who were hospitalized, two later died. Three others are in critical condition at this writing. The gunman, identified yesterday by police as Mauricio Garcia, was “neutralized” by a city police officer who was responding to an unrelated call at the mall. Authorities are reportedly investigating the gunman’s possible links to white supremacist ideology.

Allen is a city twenty-five miles north of downtown Dallas with a population of 106,874. I have been there several times over the years and have friends who live in the area.

There is something about the proximity of tragedy that makes it feel more real. For example, more than four hundred people are dead and many more are missing after flooding in eastern Congo; I confess that if these floods had happened where I live, they would feel even more tragic to me.

Our omniscient and omnipresent Father is not constrained by such territorial compassion. He loves the entire “world” (John 3:16) whether we requite his love or not (cf. Romans 5:8). As St. Augustine observed, God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

How, then, should we respond when he allows horrific tragedy? Consider two options.

“Let our might be our law of right”

One answer is to view the character of God through the prism of human suffering. Many who do this decide that God, if he exists, is certainly not love (1 John 4:8) or worthy of our love (Matthew 22:37). In this view, because we are fragile people living in a broken world, we should make the best we can of life, knowing there is no larger purpose to guide our days or redeem our pain.

In the Book of Wisdom (one of fourteen apocryphal books included in the canons of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches), we read that ungodly people “reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, ‘Short and sorrowful is our life. . . . we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts; when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works’” (Wisdom 2:1–4).

As a result, they say, “Let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless” (v. 11).

However, “They were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls; for God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity” (vv. 21–23).

“The essential activity of life”

Our other option is to view human suffering through the prism of God’s character. Many who do this believe that God grieves with all who grieve (cf. John 11:35) and calls us to join him in acting on our compassion in redemptive ways (cf. Romans 12:15).

In a brilliant new essay for the Atlantic, columnist David Brooks identifies two ways of approaching life: autonomy-based and gift based. The former stands on “one core conviction: I possess myself. I am a piece of property that I own. Because I possess property rights to myself, I can dispose of my property as I see fit. My life is a project that I am creating, and nobody else has the right to tell me how to build or dispose of my one and only life.”

Autonomy-based living is the basis for elective abortion, the sexual revolution, gender redefinition, “death with dignity,” and all other “rights” our secular society believes we deserve. According to Brooks, the consequence is a world in which “the purpose of my life . . . is to be happy—to live a life in which my pleasures, however I define them, exceed my pains.”

Gift-based living, by contrast, “starts with a different core conviction: I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself.” As a result, “The essential activity of life is not the pursuit of individual happiness. The essential activity of life is to realize the gifts I’ve been given by my ancestors and to pass them along, suitably improved, to those who will come after.”

A child shielded by his mother

A mass murderer is a horrific example of autonomy-based living, but we should not let such gruesome sin blind us to the allure of the “will to power” for the rest of us. When I claim to “possess myself” in a “project that I am creating,” I feel justified in treating people as a means to my ends, whether I treat them well or mistreat them cruelly.

Nor should we allow the unfathomable scope of human suffering to blind us to the power of gift-based living for those who receive our gifts. Scripture commands us: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10). Every grieving person we serve is someone whose life may be forever changed by our compassion.

For example, one of the first people who arrived at the scene of the mass shooting in Allen found a child covered by his mother, who died protecting him. That boy, as long as he lives, will always know how sacrificially he was loved.

Every time you see a cross, remember that the same is true for you.

How will you pay forward such sacrificial grace today?

Denison Forum