You can run, but....

The t-shirt really said it all...
"live now, pay later".
I guess that's the trade-off some think makes sense, but it's never really that easy. Most of us find (and usually a lot sooner than we expect) that the 'live' part of that equation quickly becomes 'complicated' by all kinds of more immediate effects. It's often now the young rather than the old who are finding their bodies are shutting down because of the sheer amount of 'living' (abuse) they are indulging, and that tells you something major about the bitter sting at the core of what is seen as living without limits.
The reality is that 'going for it' is just a way to try and drown out the cry from within - the need for something truly satisfying. We can look at ourselves, at others, at the world around us, and all of it resonates - booms - at us that there's something truly amazing going on here. The fibres of our flesh, our breath, our soul, tell us we were made for more than just existing in the malady of brief moments of touching true beauty, surrounded by the squalor of pain and dislocation. Why are we this way - why are you and I such a paradox?

The 'pay later' statement gives us a cue to the answer. Death overshadows our current existence because this life is scarred by our divorce from eternity. We are a fallen race, a species broken and ruined by our rebellion and corruption - hence we wallow in the transient. The great need we all have is for rescue, for liberation from the perilous trading of instant gratification before eternal death.

There is a call to each of us to truly be made free - to know the chains of our current futility broken forever, but only if we truly know we're dead men walking - that the answer lies outside of ourselves.

God sent Jesus Christ into the world not to condemn us for our rejection of Him, but to save us from the eternal darkness of cutting ourselves off from His care. He came to truly give us life that will rescue us from the horror of our empty 'living'.

There is much, much more than the broken folly of our ways without God.

It's time to stop the so-called 'living', the mindless running, and come home.