“One hundred years from now, it will not matter how big my house was or what kind of bank account I had.  What will matter is that I made a difference in the life of a child.”
     It's a quote which, in various iterations, many of us have seen.  Yet regardless of the specific wording, its sentiments remain basically the same:  the importance of making a difference in the world.
     These particular words appear on a plaque posted by the play area in a park near my home.  The plaque remembers a woman named Linda, a woman who had devoted her too short life (she died of a heart attack at 46) to caring for the children who participated in her after-school program at our community's park district.  It's a fitting memorial to her, she who had worked so tirelessly to promote the welfare and well being of every child who walked through her doors.
     Do not all of us wish to make a difference in others' lives?  It's likely.  Although how we measure the nature of this difference varies greatly from person to person, we generally agree that, when all is said and done, we want our lives to matter.
     And why not?  When we're gone, we're gone.  This life is it.  Though I do not dispute the fact of an afterlife, I feel as if we need to focus on the present life before we dream of a future existence.  After all, we cannot live again if we do not live once first.  Let's frame the future in terms it deserves:  certain but intimately rooted in, contingent upon, and wedded to the now.
     As Jesus demonstrated the night before he was crucified, although we may not want to taste the "cups" (the pains) of this life, we will never taste the joys of the next life until we take up and invest in the challenge of the present.  Whoever we are and whatever we do, we should strive to make a difference, not tomorrow, but today.  A difference for us, a difference for our fellow creatures, a difference for God.
     Without God, we can certainly make a difference, but only with God will it, in a cosmos planted in eternity, genuinely last.