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WHERE WILL YOU BE TWENTY YEARS FROM TODAY?

On June 4th, 1936, there appeared in the Washington Herald, a feature article titled, "Death sits in as Guest of Honor at Reunion of Ex-Follies Girls." With this story there was a picture of a table set for six guests. Five of the chairs were empty, and only one person sat at the prepared meal.

This was the story. Twenty years earlier six of the reigning beauty queens of their day were in their dressing room at the New York Theatre, the first home of the Ziegfield Follies.

There came into the room an elderly lady peddling cold creams. She cackled, "Once I was beautiful too my children, as beautiful as you. I was in the ‘Florida Show'. That was more than twenty years ago."

The girls shuddered and one of them said, "I wonder where we'll be twenty years from now?"

One of them remarked, "Maybe we'll be like that."

The girls confident in their dreams of happiness and success, then made a solemn pact to meet at the leading Broadway café twenty years from that night, June 2, 1916.

On the designated night of June 2, 1936, a lone figure sat at a table for six at the Paradise Restaurant to keep her pledge. She was Kathryn Lambert. The other five were all detained by a previous appointment with death.

This is the story of the missing five.

• Olive Thomas, who reached stardom in the movies and became the wife of the late Jack Pickford, had killed herself by drinking poison in a Paris hotel.
• Lilyan Tashman, who achieved the title of "the best dressed woman in Hollywood, " had died a martyr to her own beauty. Her death was said to be due largely to dieting.
• Martha Mansfield, was burned to death at the height of her Hollywood career when someone dropped a match on her ruffles and crinoline garment.
• Fifi Alsop, had married the elderly E. B. Alsop, of Pittsburgh, who had 27,000,000. She died destitute , in 1935, in a cheap rooming house and her body lay for days unclaimed on a Bellevue slab.
• Bessie Poole had died after a brawl in a New York night club.

This left Kathryn Lambert to sit alone at her table for six. What a sad, pathetic picture. Sort'a makes a person think though, doesn't it?

I doubt if any intelligent person can read that story without one thought filling their thoughts: "I WONDER WHERE I'LL BE TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW? Well, there's one thing for sure ....it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to grasp the fact that LIFE, DEATH, AND ETERNITY ENGENDER QUESTIONS FOR WHICH WE DESPERATELY NEED TO FIND ANSWERS. JUST PLAIN OLD COMMON SENSE TELLS US THAT OUR TIME ON EARTH IS FAR TOO UNCERTAIN TO GO DAY AFTER DAY WITHOUT TRYING TO DISCOVER ALL WE CAN BEFORE OUR LIFE IS CUT SHORT.

Perhaps someone reading this is thinking , "That all sounds good, but who knows the answers to questions like that? I know I don't. Maybe life after death is only a pipedream. Who knows."

My friend, that's all the more reason to make a supreme effort to find out. Maybe there isn't anything waiting beyond this life ------but what if there is? And what if you're throwing away your one chance of getting in on it? The issues we're talking about are questions about which none of us dares to be mistaken. If there truly is a gift of Eternal life that our Maker is willing to give us, then the worst thing that could happen to anyone is to lose out on that offer.

But as we said before ----- maybe there isn't anything out there ...... but how dumb for any of us to take a chance on something like that without trying to find out? The stakes are just plain too high.

Many, many over the centuries have declared with finality that they have sought and found the answers to those very questions. Many have given their lives rather than deny the reality of what they've found to be true. They're convinced that they had an encounter with Jesus that revolutionized their lives, and shaped their eternal destiny.

But then, of course there's always the possibility that they all were delusional. Right? Maybe it's just something they built up in their own minds.

But then again ... what if it isn't?

Personally, in my judgment, to live and die without ever seeking to find the answers about eternal issues, that to me is the height of folly. Such things involve life and death issues in which the risks involved are overwhelming!I do not see how any thinking man or woman can simply ignore them without any serious investigation; too much hangs in the balance.

BUT, can the answers be found? Well, according to the Bible they can, but only by those who make a sincere, all out effort to find out. In the Book of Books, God says, "You shall seek for Me and find Me, when you seek for Me with all your heart."

Still --- every tub sits on its own bottom. The decision is one that every man and woman must make for themselves. It's one choice you can't afford to be wrong about, and you won't be able to come back and change it.

"For what shall it profit a man if he
Gains the whole world and loses his soul?
Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

OH … BY THE WAY, DID I NEGLECT TO ASK YOU …
WHERE WILL YOU BE TWENTY YEARS FROM TODAY??

Posted by cdrnorth at January 18, 2006 3:16 PM

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