A Mere Mortal?

   There was a verse at the end of the reading in Psalm 78 this morning:

   " He remembered that they were but flesh,
a wind that passes and comes not again." (ESV)
   The verse above reads like this in the NLT:

   "For he remembered that they were merely mortal,
    gone like a breath of wind that never returns."
   My life is like a wind that passes through and then is gone. God says I am but a mere mortal, just another soul living for a brief time and then is gone. But I don't want it to be like that, I want to be more significant than that.

   I am in the middle of reading a book that Dwayne gave me for my birthday, The Passage of Power, the Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert Caro. This is not just another book about a man who became President of the U.S., Caro has written three others on this theme, but its time period covers the years 1960 through 1963, when this man, who had been a power in the Senate and significant in the political world, is elected the Vice President under John Kennedy, and becomes a nobody, the butt of political jokes and a symbol of "the fall of the mighty".

   LBJ becomes a "mere mortal" during those years, a footnote in the annals of history, before he is thrust again into the limelight by the assassination of JFK. Those three years of obscurity almost destroyed the man, mainly because he had lost his position of power in the political world and seemed to have no other life to live.

   Now, I confess that, according to my Kindle reader, I have only covered 30% of the book so far, and may have a different take on the man after I read the rest, but the contrast between the lives of a man, who goes from the "penthouse to the outhouse" in the terms of his perceived worth, is striking.

   Most of us will not even end our lives by becoming a footnote of history. We may be a memory in the minds of a couple of generations, but most likely just a name in a genealogy chart or an inscription on a tombstone. We want to be significant, but don't. We end up becoming "a mere mortal and a breath of wind that never returns".

   But even as our names may be forgotten over the years, our lives can still have an impact through our influence on others around us. An action or a word can change the life of someone, and who knows what that act will mean down through the years? We can't know, we can just do as God leads and let Him be the final arbiter of that.

   We may be a "mere mortal" in the eyes of men, but in God's eyes we can one of His, and there is a world of difference in that.