What Will Be Written On Your Epitaph?

A lady shared a story of how she began sexually abusing her younger ones after she got abused by an older relative. Her story got me thinking about how every act of ours has a ripple effect. A damaged person can create thousands more damaged people, same way a deed of kindness can alter the lives of an entire generation.

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Life is fascinating in many ways, it is crazy how one minute we are here and we can be gone in the next. I am not trying to write a gloomy post but a little reflection never hurts. We should search deep down within us sometimes and sincerely answer the question of what we’ll want our epitaph to read like. It doesn’t matter if death doesn’t come for us till a hundred years. We just need to get to that place where we sincerely and consciously take steps to make the world around us, and even beyond, a better place.

I discovered someone I was fairly acquainted to pass away over two years ago through a post humus birthday post that was on my Newsfeed. She used to be so full of life in the few times we met that I found it unbelievable that she was no more so I proceeded to check her wall. There were over five hundred messages confirming my fears. Each one was of deep sense of loss and appreciation of a life well lived and shared. 

It was amazing how such a young person could have lived such an impactful life. She posted inspiring words and seemed to have colored a lot of lives in bright shades in her short period on earth. She was gone but the memories she left was etched in people’s heart. I am sure her epitaph would read ‘Here lived a girl whose selfless acts colored the world around her in bright colors’. I wonder what was written on that of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King.

I wonder about how we get so sucked into the mechanisms of life that we forget that the life we live here on earth is in preparation for the afterlife. Our deeds don’t just die with us when we breathe our last, it becomes what we are remembered by and what we are judged by.

 Then I heard a voice from heaven say, "Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on." "Yes," says the Spirit, "they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them."

Rev 14:13

If you are yet to repent from your wicked deeds, please do so now. Heaven is the final destination we seek but while we are here I enjoin you to give all of your actions deeper thoughts, bearing in mind the effect your actions have on other people.