Two things for perspective

1. Look at any old photo where the people are certainly deceased due to the passage of time. The sturm and drang of their lives was real. Family is real. Survival is real. Yet what arises from it other than the wheel of life turning that is meaningful? I'll suggest ending up, one way or another, in God's camp, in Christ's army.

2. Whenever I think of all the insights that go by the wayside, the books that get read, the posts that get buried in the archives, the conversations (mostly cyber) that impart real understanding then are gone into the silence of the past.....I know that there is one thing that can be zeroed in on to make it all not all vain effort: that one thing is the two conscious shocks. Nothing is lost. What we get from influences, conversations, earned understanding, epiphanies, etc., is not lost. It's all in us. In our time. But more so if we practice the two conscious shocks.