"What A Mess!"

 "End of the Line."

This morning, Jean and I found this little creek at the bottom of a very deep gulley behind our house.  When I first saw this old, wrecked and abandoned shopping cart, I said, "Huh, end of the Line." What went through my mind at the time was sadness at the mess people make and leave behind. Then I had thoughts about how this scene was a symbol of one outcome of consumerism; covet, get, consume, use/wreck/yesterday/dissatisfied/no longer in style, dump it/throw it out, what's next?

A few hours later, when I reviewed the photos of the cart, I saw in this scene, a symbol of the outcome of so many lives today. Racing about, desperate for joy, love, acknowledgment ... going about from one place, experience, job, person, marriage, to the next -- shopping for life, hungry for something deep and lovely, but never quite getting it, or getting something that's close but nothing seems to satisfy.Yet the yearning for it, and the hope of getting it, drives one even more, convinced that this time I'll find it, this time I'll finally grab it, like the ass following a carrot, or as one person of old wrote, it's "a chasing after the wind" (Eccl. 2:11). End of the line, indeed.  Let that not be your life. There is a much, much better way.