"What's the best way to live?"

Where can I begin.

It's been a long time coming, this message, a long time steeping. 
But I'm more ready than ever to speak it, because I'm more ready to hear it for myself everyday.

Three days ago, talking with a pal named Danelboy, I asked him,
"How much do you think a person can change?"

What I meant by that was, "How much do you think a person can change the world?"
I have a fascination with impact, with making a difference; I have a burning desire to do something great and precious with my life. 

Why?

Often, I know my mind wanders to this sort of question because of this habit:
I think that I can give value to my life through what I do.  Maybe, if I do something truly worthy, or live somehow truly great, I will value my life, finally value it the way my heart longs to. 
I want a valuable life so badly, so strongly. 

That's wildly incorrect, however, that habit of thought, (that I can make my life valuable, or that "greatness" makes my life valuable...) and that's something God has definitely been challenging me to rethink over a lengthy period of time.  He wants to redefine greatness in my mind.. and he certainly wants to redefine the value of my life and existence in my mind. 

Back to my broodings of the week.  The very night after I had spoken and been thinking on such a question, "How much can a person make a difference," my spirit was struck, perhaps by a whisper, perhaps by the mind of the Lord.

I felt that the answer I'd concluded was being replaced. 
My own conclusion had been this: "You only have one life to make a difference.  You only have one lifetime to change.  So... pursue that as much as you can, while you can."

But a different sentence settled over the old, and the old was disintegrated beneath it:
"You only have one life to get to know Jesus.  One life on earth.

What will you spend your life on?"

There is nothing greater, no destiny greater, than the one with which we were created:
to discover the Lord, to know his love, to be in relationship with him!  This is our creation destiny!
This is what we were made for!  This is the value God has put within us from before we were born.

Something within me longs for greatness, and worthiness.  My worldliness projects my perceived fulfillment of this desire upon worldly greatness . . .
but God has begun something deep and old in my heart saying:
"It's not enough.  The world is not enough for you." 

There is more? 

Even Paul, when he writes to a Corinthian church, says some ridiculous things:
"while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?  ...are you not being merely human?"

Paul is talking to Christians here, the church, those whose spirits have been made alive together with Christ, and this is what he's saying:
"It's not enough for you to be living like the world anymore.  It's not enough for you to be acting 'only human.'"

How can he say this?  Because he knows, he knows, he knows-
in Christ, we are better than that.  In Christ, living like only a man is no longer living out what we have been created to experience-
because in Christ we receive a new creation where we are created to experience a destiny far, far different than the one our sinful humanity assigns us to.

I could go on for a long time, but I think the main thought I want to know for myself and communicate to you is this:
We only have one life on earth to get to know Jesus.

What will you spend your life on?