One Solitary Life – Bill's Weekly Inspiration

To My Magnificent Agents, Staff and Friends:

Because tomorrow is Christmas Eve and our office will be closed, I am sending this week’s Motivation out one day early.

Since it is Christmas, I’d like to share with you my perspective on the significance of this special Holiday. Anyone who has experienced the birth of a child or grandchild can certainly identify with the feelings of joy associated with that event. A child is so special. Holding your newborn in your arms evokes the most powerful and unforgettable of human emotions, love. peace, and hope for the future. Though it has been twenty-nine years since the birth of my youngest son, I can still recall that moment and those emotions as vividly as if it was happening today. Inasmuch as Christmas is the celebration of a birth, everybody, Christian and non-Christian alike, should at least be able to identify with the unique and wonderful feelings that such an event brings.

For Christians, however, Christmas is the celebration of a unique and special birth, the birth of Jesus, who we believe to be God made flesh. There are those of different faiths who clearly don’t believe. There are still others, without contradictory faith-based beliefs, who conclude that this “God made man” stuff just flies in the face of practical and rational possibilities. They argue, “What’s the point?” Christians respond, “He was born Man, so that He could ultimately be sacrificed for our sins. In so doing, we who believe in him as Savior might be saved and gain eternal life.” The rational purist’s response is “Why?” Why would God chose that? What need has God to become a human? If man needed to be saved, God could choose any way to do it. Why would He chose to be born 2,000 years ago in some insignificant time and place?

I confess that in my life, I have been mostly guided by rational thought and practical solutions. I suspect that is what gravitated me to business and management. I have also been susceptible to cynicism. As such, my faith has, and continues to be, tested in the realities of this modern world. What I have come to understand as I approach my sixtieth year, is that the sum of the life of any person is not the date of their birth or death. It is what happens in between. In applying my human rational thought propensities to my faith, I see God’s plan to become human as a significant part of His gift to us. He became Man to show us how to live. Even the cynics cannot dispel the significance that His life has had on the entire human race. This powerless Jewish carpenter born in backward times accomplished much during His one solitary life.

In 1926 a preacher named James Allen Francis wrote an essay about this. It was titled “One Solitary Life.” It reads as follows:

Let us turn now to the story. A child is born in an obscure village. He is brought up in another obscure village. He works in a carpenter shop until he is thirty, and then for three brief years is an itinerant preacher, proclaiming a message and living a life. He never writes a book. He never holds an office. He never raises an army. He never has a family of his own. He never owns a home. He never goes to college. He never travels two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He gathers a little group of friends about him and teaches them his way of life. While still a young man, the tide of popular feeling turns against him. One denies him; another betrays him. He is turned over to his enemies. He goes through the mockery of a trial; he is nailed to a cross between two thieves, and when dead is laid in a borrowed grave by the kindness of a friend.

Those are the facts of his human life. He rises from the dead. Today we look back across nineteen hundred years and ask, What kind of trail has he left across the centuries? When we try to sum up his influence, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned are absolutely picayune in their influence on mankind compared with that of this one solitary life…

For those cynics and followers of the rational and for those who follow different faiths, none can deny the world-changing impact of this one solitary life. I certainly can’t.

What I have found in studying the life of Jesus, is His guide, as a human being, on how to live a complete life. I believe that is why God chose to become man. He endured human emotions and challenges such as joy, love, friendship, hunger, thirst, hurt, rejection, fear, loss, pain, success, failure, adulation, betrayal, suffering and death not because He wanted or needed to deal with these in any Godly way, but, rather, to show us how to.

Christmas marks the beginning, the birth. Let us all celebrate what that means this Saturday. But, when Christmas passes into the New Year, when resolutions for how we will more meaningfully live out the coming year are fashioned, when I, like you, will be thinking of how I can make my solitary life more significant in 2011, my resolution will be to better emulate God, the Man.

Merry Christmas!

Bill Bacque’