June 13, 2008
Perry Marshall: That?s a good question. Everybody has different hard spots in their life. They are always hard for different reasons and lots of times you can?t compare one to the other.
My dad died when I was 17. There was a three year process of fighting cancer and the emotional roller coaster of ?Dad is going to be okay, Dad?s not going to be okay, Dad?s going to be okay? and all that.
Most people, by the time they are well into adulthood have probably experienced that with somebody. I remember being really upset about that.
I remember having this conversation with my mom where I said, ?Well, I guess God gave me a dad and if God is going to take my dad away then God can do that.?
Later on, it would have been about a month after my dad died, I was a senior in high school and I was taking this class. We had this interesting assignment to write a philosophy of life. By virtue of having been through the wringer with this I had given those questions a lot more thought than probably most kids do at that age.
I hope I remember this correctly; I wrote down three things and I turned this in. I said, ?Nothing is worth living for unless it?s worth dying for, because to live for something is to spend time which you can not get back in pursuit of it.? That was the first one.
I didn?t make up any of this stuff myself. I got it all from other people. The second one was ?The difficult things you deal with in life will make you a stronger, better person, but only if you let them.?
The third one I think comes from the Westminster Confession. It says, ?The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.?
That was my philosophy of life at age 17, and I don?t think I would change that now. I think that was pretty good, but being forced to confront a lot of hard issues is, I think, the only way you really figure out what is important and what is not.
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