Walk through any cemetery and read the stones. A name. A birth year. A dash. A death year.
Eight characters for the beginning and the end. One small mark for everything in between. The marriage. The kids. Forty years of work. Every Sunday, every Tuesday night, every decision nobody saw. All of it pressed into a line you could cover with your thumb.
Your stone is coming, brother. Your birth year is already settled. Someone else will fill in the second one. The only part you get to write is the dash.
So here’s the question I can’t shake: what are we doing with ours?
The Comfortable Lie
Here’s the life a lot of us men in the American church have settled for.
Don’t make waves. Be a good person. Show up to work and do just enough to keep the paycheck safe. Go home to a family that’s decently happy with you. Get together with the guys on some random weekend when the schedules line up. Church most Sundays. Then do it all again, week after week, until you retire and ride off into the sunset.
None of those things is a sin on its own. Work is good. Family is good. Rest is good. Retirement (although not mentioned anywhere in scripture) isn’t wicked. But look at the shape of that life. Nothing in it requires Jesus to be alive. A decent man with no faith at all could live it just as well, and plenty do.
That should bother us. Because Jesus didn’t call us to be decent. He called us to be salt and light.
Salt That Lost Its Taste
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” Matthew 5:13 (ESV)
Notice what Jesus didn’t say. He didn’t say, “Try to become salt.” He said you are. If you belong to Him, that’s who you are. The question isn’t whether you’re salt. It’s whether anyone around you can taste it.
In Jesus’ day, salt kept meat from rotting and gave food its flavor. But it only worked on contact. It had to get into the thing it was meant to change.
Much of the salt in that part of the world came from around the Dead Sea, mixed with other minerals. Many commentators point out that when it got damp, the real salt could wash out and leave a white crust behind. It looked like salt. It sat on the shelf like salt. It did nothing.
That’s the danger for us. Not that we’d stop looking like Christians. That we’d keep the look and lose the bite. Same church clothes. Same vocabulary. No effect on anything around us. Jesus’ verdict on that kind of salt is blunt: “no longer good for anything.” It’s a hard word, and He meant it as one.
A Light Under a Basket
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 5:14–16 (ESV)
Nobody lights a lamp to hide it. Light exists to be seen. And look at the point: “that they may … give glory to your Father.” Your light isn’t a spotlight on you. It points them to Him.
A dimmed light still technically burns. It just can’t help anyone find their way. Your coworkers don’t know whose you are. Your neighbors couldn’t tell you. Your kids see a man who goes to church, but rarely see a man whose life only makes sense if Jesus is real.
Jesus had His sharpest words for a church that got comfortable. “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17). Not cold. Not hot. Lukewarm. If any church in history needs to hear that, it’s ours.
“Was That a Tragedy?”
On May 20, 2000, John Piper stood on a wet field at Shelby Farms outside Memphis and preached to around 40,000 college students at Passion’s OneDay (The Gospel Coalition). The message was called “Boasting Only in the Cross,” and it became known for one plea: Don’t waste your life (watch it here).
He told them about two women from his church:
“Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over the cliff, and they were both killed instantly. And I asked my people: Was that a tragedy?” John Piper, OneDay 2000
His answer: “No. That is not a tragedy. That is a glory.”
Then he read from a 1998 Reader’s Digest about Bob and Penny, a couple who took early retirement at 59 and 51, moved to Punta Gorda, Florida, and spent their days cruising on a 30-foot trawler, playing softball, and collecting shells. Picture coming to the end of your one and only life, Piper said, and the last great work you hand your Creator is, “I collected shells. See my shells.”
“That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. And I get forty minutes to plead with you: don’t buy it.” John Piper, OneDay 2000
Piper was preaching to college kids. But Bob and Penny’s dream doesn’t start at 59. It starts at 35, with a man who decides a quiet, unbothered, decent life is the goal. The seashells are just the last chapter of a story he’s been writing for thirty years.
And hear this clearly: Piper’s point wasn’t that every man has to move to Cameroon. Ruby and Laura didn’t matter because of where they served. Their lives were poured out for “one great thing.” You can do that from a cubicle, a truck cab, a job site, a classroom, or a kitchen table. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23). That one verse kills “just enough to keep the paycheck safe.”
What Goes in the Dash
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12 (ESV)
James says your life is “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). Paul says to make “the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16). And every one of us “must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10). The dash will be reviewed.
Piper told that crowd about a plaque that hung in his childhood home, with C. T. Studd’s lines on it: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”
A dash that matters isn’t a busy one. It’s a spent one. Spent on:
Your wife, loved the way Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25), not just kept decently happy.
Your kids, discipled, not just provided for (Deuteronomy 6:6–7).
Your work, done as worship, with your name on it (Colossians 3:23).
Your brothers, not an arbitrary night out, but men who know your sin and help carry your load (Galatians 6:2).
The people around you, who ought to know whose you are and why (Matthew 5:16; 1 Peter 3:15).
Grace for the Years Already Gone
Some of you are reading this and feeling the weight of years you can’t get back. Hear me, brother: you’re not reading your own eulogy. You’re still breathing, which means your dash isn’t finished.
Jesus told a story about a landowner who hired workers at the eleventh hour, and paid them a full day’s wage (Matthew 20:1–16). That’s grace. It doesn’t mean wait. It means start.
And this isn’t about earning anything. Piper’s text that day was Galatians 6:14: “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You don’t spend your life to buy God’s favor. You spend it because you’ve already been bought. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
Salt doesn’t try to be salty. It just is, until it gets washed out. Stay in the Word. Stay near your brothers. Stay in contact with the world you’re meant to change.
FIELD WORK
Write your stone. Take a card and write your birth year, a dash, and leave the second date blank. Under the dash, write three lines you want to be true when someone else fills in that date. Then pull up last week’s calendar and bank statement. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Do they match your three lines? Pick one thing to change this week that only makes sense if Jesus is alive. Then tell one brother what it is.
A Prayer
Father, You numbered my days before one of them came to be. Forgive me for the years I’ve spent playing it safe, keeping the peace, and calling it faithfulness. Make me salty again. Pull my lamp out from under the basket. Let my wife, my kids, my coworkers, and my brothers see something in me that only makes sense because Jesus is alive. I don’t want to bring You a shell collection. I want to bring You a life poured out for one great thing. Spend my dash for Your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.