A friend of mine showed me an illustration one day. He is a professor and we were in one of his classrooms. He stood at his white board with a black marker and I sat at one of the students’ tables and he said, “Here, look at this idea I have,” and he drew a black vertical line on the board.

“This is your birth,” he said. Then he drew a horizontal line away from the line marking my birth. “Imagine the important events of your life as vertical lines intersecting the horizontal line,” he said. “This is when you learned to walk,” he said and made a mark. “This is when your grandpa unexpectedly died when you were only four,” and he made a much larger vertical smudge, and I flexed inside at the memory, his point made clear. He went on in this fashion listing things he knew about my young life, making so many small and large marks across the line that has been my life. First girlfriend, first kiss, car crash, high school graduation, and so on until he came to my present days. Then he said, “Imagine what might go on in the rest of your days,” and he continued drawing the horizontal line until he said I was dead. “You’re dead,” he said sadly. He drew a high black bar and said, “That’s it.” He paused for effect, and I could see he was truly moved by what he was about to express.

“That’s not even close to it, the end,” he said. And he kept drawing a line beyond the tall black bar until he came to the end of the white board. Then he said, “Imagine eternity, imagine I draw this line across the wall of this classroom, out that window, imagine I draw it down the street with paint and keep painting a giant line all the way to the ocean, a thousand miles away.” He was on a roll and his passions had risen, I could tell. “Imagine I get on a boat and somehow keep the line going across the ocean and circle the earth…. Well, that would only be a fraction, a tiny bit of the beginning of the eternity that is really a life.”

He stood for a while then walked back to the center of the board and pointed to the small space between where my life is today and where it might end and he said, “Looking at your life in light of what will follow death, I ask you a question, what will you do with this time here? What lines will mark the final passages of your life? For what you do now is the measure of what you take with you into that eternity. What are you going to do? What is going to be the most important thing?”

It was such a simple illustration, pretty juvenile really, but it affected me. Wisdom is usually this simple.

That day I realized that only the most important thing in life could be worth living for. So I started wondering what this thing might be.

What is the most important thing? Well, an ancient Hebrew proverb writer may have said it best. “Buy the truth and do not sell it, get wisdom, discipline, and understanding.” Later Jesus of Nazareth said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

A lot of people talk about a lot of different religions in this world as the most important thing and I don’t want to start an argument with anyone about religion. I do want to ask you to consider something though—Truth. I want you to consider what might be true in this world. I don’t want to ask you to think about the religions of Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism or anything, but only consider who this man Jesus was and what he said (not what people might say he said, but what he actually said—you can read it yourself in the bible). He said he was truth. What did he mean?

I think that when a person finds the answer to this question—who is the man Jesus and what did he mean when he talked about Truth—they find the answer to the question of what is the most important thing in life.

Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and the life. The way to where? The truth about what? What kind of life?

If you read his words I think you will find these answers yourself. His words are recorded in the four gospels which are at the beginning of the new testament of the bible (if you don’t have a bible and you would like one just email us and we will find a way to get you to one). You can also look further and see what was predicted about Jesus in the writings of the old testament of the bible, and you can also see what happened immediately after his death in the remaining books of the new testament. I think you will find the reading at the very least exciting. I am confident you will find in the reading even more, though. I have.

You have to know this is not some clever attempt to trick you into converting to a religion. I think if Jesus is what he claimed to be, which is Truth, then he absolutely has to go beyond all religion and answer the questions of all religions. This is what I have found in Jesus. Even people like Mahatma Ghandi found this much in Jesus. Follow Mahatma’s example and look for yourself. He did.