We’ve all heard it said that no one has ever seen a hearse towing a trailer. We’ve all been challenged to consider that we leave this world as we entered it—with empty hands. As Job exclaimed in the depths of his misery, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.” But as J.R. Miller reminds us in this old quote, there actually is one thing we can take with us.
There are virtues, fruits of character, treasures, spoils of moral conquests which men carry with them out of this world.
Someone says, “The only thing that walks back from the tomb with the mourners and refuses to be buried, is character.” This is true. What a man is survives him. It never can be buried.
His character lingers about his home when his footsteps come there no more. It lives in the community where he was known. And that same thing—what a man is—he carries with him into the next life. Money and rank and circumstances and earthly gains, he leaves behind him, but his character, he takes with him into eternity!
That being the case, perhaps you should ponder this today: How are you shaping your character? How are you shaping and forming that one thing that you will take with you into eternity?
