Yesterday, I blogged about a college reunion I attended over the weekend.  I incorporated the opening lines of Psalm 90 into my remarks.  Today, the reunion still on my mind I share the closing verses of the same psalm.  Translated, they read, "Give permanence [Lord] to the works of our hands; give permanence to the works of our hands."
     Every one of us, I suspect, harbors some longing that after he or she is gone from the planet, something of him or her will linger, to name just a few examples, be it a vocational accomplishment, particularly amazing adventure, a loving and caring personality, a work of art, or children and grandchildren.  We hope that those we leave will retain evidence of our presence, a meaningful indication that we had lived on this earth.
     Unless we are especially famous, however, once those who loved us are gone, we will be, too:  there will be no one left to remember us.  I have meditated on these lines quite a bit since coming home from the reunion.  All of us have made an impact on the planet; all of us have touched lives.  Yet when we are gone, our physical bodies never to walk across the world again, we would like to think, I imagine, that whatever we did will be, in some sense, permanent.  That how we lived has mattered.  That what we did made a difference.
     And in the big picture, they will.  Yet in the much bigger picture of cosmic birth and annihilation, they will not.  One day, they will all be nothing, nothing at all.
     Hence do I pray, for all of us, that God, the eternal presence working in us all, will indeed make us permanent, to make us, even after the final star is extinguished, last.