A student is planning to maintain high marks, graduate from high school, then go to college and prepare for a useful and worthwhile career.  A young couple is  planning to get married, have a wonderful relationship and build a beautiful home.  Parents are planning to instill in their children a sense of self-worth and high moral values that will guide and sustain them long after they are gone from home.

And no doubt each of us is planning to become the best person that he or she possibly can.  We plan to be true to our principles, faithful to our friends, diligent in our work, honest in our dealings, strong in adversity, forgiving in time of need.

All of these are worthy objectives, but they mean absolutely nothing until and unless we implement those means that enable us to reach them.  That student must develop the study habits that lead to a good education.  The young couple must practice those principles of love and faithfulness which build strong marriages and beautiful homes.  Those parents must give their children the unconditional love and fair discipline that lead to a strong self-image.  Then they must also give them a living example of what it means to have high moral values.

In your life and mine, we must practice those techniques and daily disciplines which make for the   building of strong personal character.  There are no shortcuts to a life of honesty, courage, fidelity, and unselfishness.  If we would be those things tomorrow, then we must practice those things today.  Few, if any of us, fail for want of worthy objectives.  Most of us choose the high ideal, but how insignificant that can be unless we also choose the means that enable us to achieve that ideal.  It is something to want Jesus and the Kingdom of God on earth and in our hearts; it is another thing to walk the road which leads to that Kingdom.

The truth is that each of us is headed somewhere right now.  When you get where you’re going, where will you be?

Why is it that our living is so often unsatisfactory and ineffective?  The tendency with most is to blame our circumstances.  And anyone would be a fool to belittle the importance of circumstances.  The home in which a person is reared can literally make him or break him.

Nevertheless, the shallowness of the wrongness of our lives is not due to unfortunate circumstances.  The main trouble lies within ourselves and the day to day choices and decisions that we make.  We applaud the ideal of Christian living, but many take no pains with the means of reaching it.  Our failure lies not in choosing wrong goals, but in choosing wrong roads.

Again I ask: When you get where you’re going in life, where will you really be?