Buried in the text of Paul's second first letter to his protégé Timothy is some advice to, "Flee youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace."  I don't think any of us would deny that this is good advice.  Ought we not to focus on things which make for greater fulfillment and social comity rather than chasing after the evanescent lusts of youth?  Fair enough, yet to take this verse in only this way means that those who are considerably beyond their youth and who may have long ago forsworn such "lusts" may not find much of an incentive, in this verse alone, to seek higher things.  They have, to put it vernacularly, "moved past" them.
     Although I do not dispute that Paul is likely encouraging Timothy to work diligently to avoid being distracted by youthful folly, I cannot help but think that perhaps youthful lusts include things that are not necessarily bound by youth in terms of age but youth in terms of wisdom.  And when I mention wisdom, I think about wisdom as not necessarily the so-called wisdom of the elders, but of the wisdom that comes from acknowledging the truest and most fundamental realities of this world.
     All of us are Timothys, really.  All of us fail to consistently step back and really think about what we are all about and why we are here.  All of us get entangled in the lusts of a "youthful" perspective on life.  All of us forget that life is more than us.  Not that we need to be constantly preoccupied with such burning and fundamental issues, but that we do ourselves no favors to run blithely through life without ever wondering what it means.
     So does Paul tell Timothy to abandon the foolish of existential myopia and pursue, foremost, faith, for it seems that in faith we see the most basic of all parameters of existence.  We see the rawness of finitude, the absurdity of terminality.  We see that regardless of what we believe about God or the supernatural, we all, in the end, live by faith.  We just do not know anything with absolute certainty.
     Yet it is what we have faith in--what we fundamentally trust--that makes all the difference.  Do we trust a God who is there or a mortal self which one day will not?