Haunting words

When I was going through a dry spell, my friend Romy Solis gave me a set of audio materials of Ravi Zacharias. The name was foreign to me, but I decided to listen to the materials anyway. In just a few minutes, I learned so much!

That was almost nine years ago. Today, I still listen to Ravi Zacharias. I subscribe to his podcasts. I even went to Oxford University three years ago and attended his summer course on apologetics.

In one of his talks, he quoted Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge’s haunting words still ring loud and clear in my mind today.

Muggeridge was a journalist, reporter and an agnostic who, in his later years, embraced Christ as his savior. He possessed a brilliant mind and an ability to put power into words in order to stimulate the mind. Listen to this:

 “I looked back upon my own fellow countrymen (Great Britain), once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty shall make them mightier yet.

“I heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I have heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as being wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.

“I have seen America wealthier and, in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, that had half the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Cesar or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquest.

“All in one life time... All in one lifetime... All gone! Gone with the wind!

“England, now part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy… Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy… Stalin, a forbidden name in a regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of those precious fluids that keep their motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixote, of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.

“All in one life time... All in one life time... All gone! Gone with the wind!

“Behind the debris of these solemn supermen and self-styled imperial diplomatists stand the gigantic figure of the One: because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace, in the person of Jesus Christ.” I present this person to you today, the One who can be your Lord and Savior.

Powers fall. Dynasties collapse. Empires cease to exist. And yet there are people on this planet still engrossed in building empires, totally uninterested in eternity – businessmen building their conglomerate empires, religious leaders building their earthly religious empires, cult leaders building their cultic empires “in the Name of God.”

All in one life time… All in one lifetime… All gone! Gone with the wind, said Muggeridge.

Do not envy the bigs and the powers of this world. Stay humble, and let Christ be the Big One in your life, while we wait to go Home.

Love God, love men, and be the best you can ever be, not only in the work you do, but more so in the way you live. This is what we bring with us when we go Home.

(Spend two whole days with Francis Kong developing your leadership skills this April 25-26 at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel. For further inquiries, contact Inspire Leadership Consultancy Inc. at 632-6872614 or 09178511115.)