Eddie Van Halen was my sworn enemy when I was a teenager aspiring to be a guitar god. I’m a bit competitive by nature. I’ll never forget a trip I took to the local Guitar Center on Hacienda Boulevard (SoCal) when I was 16 or 17. For some reason driving there I was thinking of Van Halen, and I must haven’t know the band was starting to make it big. I determined then and there that I would beat him and become the greatest guitar player of all time! Delusions of grandeur were one of my favorite pastimes. Needless to say I never made it to guitar god stardom, thankfully. God had different plans, but being a guitarist I couldn’t help being awed by the greatness of Eddie Van Halen. Alas, as you probably know, he recently went the way of all flesh, and reminds us, as if we needed reminding, Momento Mori, we too must die.
As we get older heading for our inevitable end, an increasing number of the cultural icons we grew up with meet their destiny with mortality, and it is strange. Those people at the time seemed indestructible, larger than life, and we can’t imagine them not being there, doing their thing. At times like this as reality makes its way through the memories of my past, I’m reminded of these words that King David of Israel wrote 3,000(!) years ago in Psalm 39:
4 “O Lord, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting I am!
5 Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths,
and my lifetime is as nothing before you.
Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Selah
6 Surely a man goes about as a shadow!
Surely for nothing[a] they are in turmoil;
man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather!7 “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait?
My hope is in you
What this tells us is that every day, every moment of our lives, should be lived in light of its end. We must reject the secular culture that tries to seduce us at every turn to ignore that end. We must reject the delusion that this life is all there is, or that what happens in this life is more important than what happens in the next. Most importantly, it reminds us where our true hope lies, and it’s not on this side of the grave. The beauty of Christianity is that God encourages us to make the most of this life because after all, it’s a life he’s given us in his goodness. But as a steam of a breath on a cold winter morning disappears in moments, so will this life disappear.
I watched an interview with Van Halen from 2015 when he was my current age, and the interviewer asked him at one point where he got his inspiration for his constant drive to learn more and become better. He shrugged his shoulders, and pointed up. She basically ignored it, but I pray before the end he put his trust in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He knew his talent came from somewhere, and he realized it was from beyond himself, from something far greater than one of the greatest guitar players of all time. RIP
Recent Comments