This is the third renourishment project for the south end of Amelia Island. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that if a system is left alone, its entropy tends to increase, or in laymen's terms, the system tends to slow down or change its form, or deteriorate. Unless systems are maintained they will break down. Beaches will change, according to the influence of tides, currents, and storms, unless they are renourished. The same dynamic applies to our earthly lives.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16, "Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." Peterson translates this passage, "Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There's far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can't see now will last forever."

"On the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us." It certainly does. Everything is falling apart on us. We are sagging everywhere.

No amount of plastic surgery can prevent the law of entropy: 'the system tends to slow down, or change its form, or deteriorate'... Our bodies will, and do, fall apart on us as we age. The knees give way, the hips protest, our muscles get flabby, our feet hurt, our eyes get tired. If all we have is our bodies in this life we would, of all people, most be pitied. We would be like old animals which eventually have to be put out of their misery. q.v. Ecclesiastes 12:1-7

But the apostle is looking at our existence from two different points of view. By outwardly Paul means our mortality, our life as belonging to this age which is passing away - it is this life which is deteriorating. By inwardly Paul means our eternal life, our life that belongs to the age to come which is already present but not yet complete.

Aging and physical deterioration is often accompanied by anxiety and depression. It is more so for the person for whom the outward life is all that he or she has. However we do not lose heart, because God is renourishing us.

The believer knows that the progressive decay of himself outwardly is being accompanied by the proportional renewal of himself inwardly. Our inner lives are renewed daily by being repaired and refreshed because God is creating within our inner nature a new person out of the old, so that when it is finished it will be completely new.

"On the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There's far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can't see now will last forever." Why is this so hard for us to grasp and to appreciate? Because we are so shortsighted we can only focus on the short-term rather than the eternal.

Sheila Bair, chairman of the FDIC from 2006 until 2011, in a Washington Post article (July 8, 2011), claimed that we are impeded by a culture of short-termism that dominates our society. "The common thread running through all the causes of our economic tumult is a pervasive and persistent insistence on favoring the short term over the long term, impulse over patience. Our decades-long infatuation with financing our spending through ever-growing debt, in the private and public sector alike, is the ultimate manifestation of short-term thinking...

Households have failed to save enough money to carry them through hard times or to achieve long-term goals. ...In our routine decision-making, research shows, we increasingly use the part of our brain attuned to greed, fear and instant gratification. This short-termism is reinforced when economic incentives are taken into account....

Mortgage brokers and the issuers of mortgage-based securities were typically paid based on volume, and they responded to those incentives by making millions of risky loans, then moving on to new jobs long before defaults and foreclosures reached record levels. Such arrangements gave rise to the acronym IBG-YBG ("I'll be gone, you'll be gone"), a watchword for short-termism in the mortgage industry during the boom. ...

The media has also played a role in expanding short-termism. The type of information that dominates cable news and the blogosphere is generally not designed to appeal to our more rational, long-term thought processes. Instead, it excites our emotions, inducing greed and fear, and more often stokes prejudice and cynicism than rationality and fortitude. The 24-hour news cycle bombards us with constant information that compels action, not patience. Sound logic is often trumped by the sound bite....

Responsible policies are promptly vilified if they involve the lightest hint of short-term sacrifice....The current impasse in addressing the unsustainable growth in the federal debt also goes beyond mere partisanship to a distorted sense of the long-term national interest.....there are limits to what excessive spending and borrowing can do for long-term economic growth and stability."

This culture of short-termism prevents us from focusing on God's long-term project in our lives. God wants to rebuild us, renourish us, into his image. He takes a lifetime to work on us. He asks that we cooperate with him in that process. This renewal or renourishment of the inner life is sometimes called soul-making.

Imagine your life as a beach that is deteriorating because the good soil has been swept away, and the foundations of your life are being undermined by the insidious encroachment of time and tide over the passing of the years. A life that is lived only on the outside, becomes diminished and embittered as it wastes away.

The soul that follows Christ looks ahead to the life that it is entering on and preparing for. We think long-term, beyond this life to eternity. We act responsibly knowing we are going to be judged for what we do or fail to do. We know that death is not the end but a new beginning. We invest in the future life, the spiritual not just the material. We decide to do what is necessary to replace, add to, put on, renourish and renew our inner lives. We continue to set ourselves daily agendas to become like Christ, to be renewed in knowledge in the image of our Creator.

When we do that, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times become small potatoes compared to the long-term rewards of the coming good times. We have to be patient, and long-suffering, for we have to fix our eyes not on what is seen - the short-term - but on what is unseen - the long-term. For we know that what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen, is eternal - and they will last forever.

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