day 2848: Future Tense

“Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before or after his time.”

With all the controversy of what monuments of people should stand and which should be taken down, it is a good reminder that the legacy of our lives, our companies, and our brands are daily being written. We cannot control what the future tense will be or how the future will interpret anything of what will one day be our past, but we can control today on what it is that we are contributing to the story that will be told.

The Books of Kings is filled with one King after another who gets remembered as either good or bad. There was one king, King Ahaz who “did not do what was pleasing in the Lord’s sight.” He joined a long list of those remembered like him.  And there was another who was bad, but not quite as bad, which I also chuckle at God’s backhanded compliment of King Hoshea who “did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, but not as much as the Kings of Israel who ruled before him”.  And then there is King Hezekiah who received a legacy statement like no other King. We are not Kings, but we do have rule over who we will be in the sight of the Lord.  God will write our ultimate epitaph so we have to daily ask ourselves, which kind of ruler of ourselves do we want to be?

Reference: 2 Kings 18:5 (New Living Translation)