Life is a bazaar, a country fair with booths and stalls, and life is a midway down which we walk. The lights blaze; the hucksters shout their wares; the music plays. The wise and foolish must pass the booths with their shining articles, their flashing prizes, their tinseled favors, and their eye-catching gifts.

Are the goods worth the cost? How much are we spending? Life is like that. We must ask ourselves questions about our purpose. Are we living in a meaningful way? Are we doing things about which we will be proud? Are we going to find ourselves at an end to the fair, booths closed, and goods gone? We must be careful not to give ourselves for things, which can end up pretty sad and tragic.

Life has a precious sound. The word sounds like hope and springtime. It summons an awareness of warmth and laughter and tasks to be eagerly faced and trials to be victoriously met. We struggle against the evils of this world. We struggle against the trials and tribulations of life, drugs, alcohol, poor parenting, bad neighborhoods, and terrible environments. No matter how universal these conditions, we stand on the edge of the yet-to-be. Our best selves are in process. We are running life’s race and are determined to cross the finish line despite the obstacles.

The great life means walking on a path that leads to radiant and triumphant living. This cannot be measured in the abundance of things which a person possesses. Nor can it be achieved by serving one’s self. Triumphant life means dedicating oneself to the goal of serving others.

Anticipation of great things yet to be is a thoroughly legitimate attitude. This attitude does not necessarily depend entirely on what has already happened. Faith has the power to give substance to things that have not yet come to pass, to clothe hope with reality and to put sinews and flesh on dreams.

So many of us spend our time looking back to the past as if all the wonderful things that could ever happen have already taken place. Things used to be wonderful for us, but that is past. Of course, we should find strength in the past, but not to live in it as if we have nothing but memories left to us. The past ought to get us ready for the present and the future. The past is of meaning supremely because it gives us hints and clues for the future, not because it affords us luxury of memories out of which the element of uncertainty has been drained. A wise observer has rightly said that the past ought to be a milestone to help us measure the distance we have come; it ought never to be a millstone holding back the adventures that are yet to be.

We talk about wanting to live, we are talking about wanting to see fulfillment that life has a meaning that we believe it was intended to have. We have now begun to suspect that while these tools are wonderful things, they are not exactly the same thing as life. They may augment it, they may supplement it, they may enhance it but they are not life. The grandest heresy of Western civilization was that life can be lived from the outside inwardly.

Destiny is making itself known to us. There is a language of grace, which we have only learned to stutter in its simplest words. There are vistas and distances that we have not begun to reach. We are growing. A wise person said, “The brook becomes a stream, the stream a river, the river widens to the sea. The infant grows into a child, the child into a youth, the youth into a man.” We are becoming and we are not yet what we shall be!

A famous sermon begins, “When life tumbles in, what then.” When life does tumble in, at that point or some other point, countless people must make their decision as to what they will do, how they will carry it off when the pilgrimage of life moves from an even path to a rocky road beneath leaden skies and amidst gloomy surroundings. For all of us, life does tumble in over and over again. Life is filled with these interludes of disappointment and sorrow. There are times in life when the days seem hardly worth living, when the sun has left the sky, and we walk through a grim, gray, cloudy time. But, amidst this restless, rolling, raging sea we call life, there is a North Star, a fixed point in creation, a constant in the presence of change, an abidingness where all else is does not matter. Life can be radiant with hope.

We are all pilgrims on the road of life who have taken on the journey. We travel toward life’s home. The road of our lives curves by loneliness and dips through the valley of sorrow, the dark glen of betrayal and towns of doubt, but stay on the road. Life can be beautiful with all its succeeding stages and ages a glory, for we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Those who are on the journey will get home.