Establishing my path in eternity

This month, I'm attempting to read a chapter of Proverbs each day, as an easy reading schedule to remember but primarily as a means of soaking up wisdom and being challenged to put it into practice. Today, I noticed that the main theme of Proverbs 4 seems to be to follow wise instruction and stay on the right path - as v27 puts it, to "ponder the path of your feet, and let all your ways be established;" that is, to be discerning and intentional about the way in which you live and about the direction and destination of the road you choose to travel.

From there I turned to Colossians 3 (as part of my more erratic attempt to read from the New Testament regularly as well) and was struck by how it seemed to perfectly complement Proverbs 4. First there were the encouragements and warnings to live by God's instruction and wisdom; then there were the practical details of how to do so. Of all those practical directions and commands, however, the one that struck me the most was, ironically, the least practical in appearance, in v2: "Set your minds on things above, not on things on the earth."


Now, both Proverbs and Colossians are rich with wisdom on how to live in this earth, with the things on this earth, so I doubt that this verse means we are to neglect our earthly relationships and responsibilities in order to meditate solely on eternity and on God. God did create us as physical beings and place us in a physical and temporal world, after all! Instead, I think it means that our desires, aspirations, intentions, and motivations - those things which are in our mind but which affect every action we take - ought to be focused on the eternal and the heavenly rather than the temporal and the earthly. When I plan dinners for Paul and I, do I do so out of love and respect (qualities eternal and heavenly in their essence, and relating to the good and right interaction between two eternal beings), or do I do so simply because cooking is something I enjoy and we need to eat? In other words, do I make dinner simply to satisfy my physical needs and experience temporal pleasure, or do I make dinner with eternity in my eyes? We have responsibilities regarding these temporal things, most certainly, but the mind behind our actions regarding the temporal must be gazing into eternity.

With an eternal perspective, the importance of ensuring the road we choose to walk through time is established and founded becomes more immediately apparent: it is not merely a temporal road, ending at death, destined to become a forgotten nothing; rather, it reaches past time and thus choosing the wrong fork in the road now could have eternal consequences (beyond affecting our eternal destination, our choices now shape who we will become for all eternity, to borrow an idea from C.S. Lewis). So even when the things we must think about and do seem almost entirely temporal in nature, by doing them for God and because of God we set our minds on things above. By pondering the path of our feet, we are able to choose the path which perceives and gives life to the eternal essence of all good and godly things, and thus can learn to live on the earth with our minds and hearts full of the glow of heaven.