“I guess you have your choice of trying to make money or getting involved with adventure.  Most people get married, and by the time they’re 30 they’ve got a couple of kids, and then they’re strapped down. Then they have to work.”
     So said Fred Beckey, renowned American mountaineer who died last week at the age of 94.  Beckey took up climbing at a very early age and never stopped.  He climbed well into his nineties.  Although some of his fellow mountaineers found Beckey to be cantankerous and difficult at times, they uniformly lauded his exploits on the peaks.  Beckey probably put up more first ascents than any other mountaineer in history.  He seemed unstoppable.
     As it turned out, only death could stop him.  All of us have a choice in how we live our lives.  Though we are born into different situations and circumstances, some to lives of honor and privilege, others to lives of ignominy and poverty, we all, in the end, must decide, for ourselves, how we will live the life we have been given.  For Beckey, it was adventure.
     What is it for you?  If you dig deep enough, you will see, in a manner of speaking, that eternity, the vast and unremitting presence that surrounds this finite world, hinges on what you decide.  Beckey created a life of meaning.  So can you.  Yet neither you nor he could do unless there is a God.
     Otherwise, our lives have no real reason to be.