Cedar Sentinel 2013-2014 Issues February 2014: Issue 47 Issue 5 | Page 6

Remembrance

By: Paul Roschman

How do you want to be remembered? In 100 years’ time you and everybody you know will be dead.
When your children and your grandchildren remember you, who will they speak of? What kind of life
will you have lived? With every choice you make, you shape the man or woman they will recall. It’s up
to you whether you are spoken of with hate and revulsion, or love and fondness. It’s your choice whether
the world will regret your passing. Everything you do has an effect on somebody else’s life. No man is an
island, and for every hurtful act you commit, people are injured, mentally, physically, emotionally, or a
combination thereof. Likewise, for every good deed you do, it ripples.

Everybody that history remembers as great made a choice. The people of England stood up to
the Nazis during the Battle of Britain and refused to surrender. The following months took the lives of
thousands of men, women, and children, yet they stuck to their choice, and in the end prevailed. The
early Christian church made the choice to follow Jesus no matter what, no matter the persecution they
suffered, and Christianity spread like wildfire across the Roman Empire and soon became the dominant
religion. Jesus made the choice to come down to earth and give up everything for the very people who
would kill him.

I’m not trying to say that if you do the right thing then everything will go right for you, you’ll be
remembered as a saint and a hero, and you’ll die at the ripe old age of 93 with your family around you
in the mansion you built with your own two hands. Doing the right thing isn’t about what you get in
the end. It’s about being able to live with yourself as you live through your life, instead of your soul being
in agony because of the people you have hurt and destroyed. This being said while doing the right thing
is a great thing, it should not be done just because it’s the right thing to do and you know it. It should
be done rather because you want to do it, because that’s the type of person you are, or are becoming
through Christ. You will mess up throughout life’s journey, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory
of God.” We cannot rely on our strength to prevail against our own sinful nature. If we do this we shall
surely fail time and time again. But that failure doesn’t matter, because Jesus paid it all and took the
consequences of our failure upon himself.

As you go through the rest of your education, and onwards to the real world, think about what type
of person you want to be. Think about what kind of world you want your children to be born into and if
this world isn’t it, do something about it. Live your life so that when Jesus comes in the clouds of glory, he
will say to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant”. Make your life mean something.