In My Life

“There’s got to be more to life than this!” It’s rhetorical, but the speaker is hoping her friend has an answer. She’s just broken up with her lover and, feeling lonely and dejected, has reached out to her boss for solace. They’re detectives in an English series set in Holland. This comes at the start of another murder mystery. Her ‘question’ is left dangling for days, so it’s no surprise to see her just as confused as we are, when out of nowhere, 90 minutes later in our time, in the closing scene, he answers, “There is.” Mystified she asks, “What is?” He mumbles, “There is more to life than this.” Cut to credits and clips from next week’s show.

This exemplifies something that I was taught about the craft of sermon writing. Pose a pertinent question at the beginning, with an illustration, that will be answered by the end. “Many will have forgotten the purpose of the message, but harking back to the opening will bring it all back home to your hearers.”

By the way, the words were different but that love-sick detective asked the same question I did when I was lost and desperate for a reason to go on living. I had to wait, not for 90 minutes but for a few fretful years for an answer. I wanted to know, “What’s it all about? Why are we here? Where are we going? What’s the point of living?” How about you?

I’m pretty sure that the senior detective in the story came to that conclusion after having convinced the murderer, an avid atheist, not to throw himself off a high-rise roof into possible utter darkness; or worse.

Something old worth watching

Track down “To End All Wars” – starring Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle. Captured by the Japanese a group of courageous soldiers are forced to build a railway from Thailand to Burma. A story of intense internal battles as each prisoner strives to survive in the face of gross inhumanity. Be warned: some graphic torture and language.