Where's Your Life Headed? // Living a Life that Leaves a Legacy of Love, Part 1

<p>Life on this earth is no dress rehearsal. We get just the one chance at it and when it’s gone it’s gone. So … what sort of a legacy do you want to leave behind when your life is gone? And … are you living the sort of life, that will indeed deliver the legacy you’re after.</p> <p> </p> <h4><span style="color: #ff9900;"><strong>At the End of the Day</strong></span></h4> <p>Right now, there are just over 7 billion people living on planet earth; a number that’s going up every day. Today, just under 360,000 babies will be born into the world. And just over 150,000 people will die. So the net population growth of people on planet earth is around 210,000 a day, or around 75 million people a year.</p> <p>They’re big numbers to contemplate, especially when all that you and I see is the small subsection of that 7 billion people that live around where we live. And in all of human history, they tell us that just over 100 billion people have been born on the earth and each of those 100 billion people have left a legacy. For many of them, their most obvious legacy is the children they left behind, who have had their own children, who in turn had children and so the human legacy of people is the most obvious thing they leave behind.</p> <p>You and I are descended from an incredibly long line of people – the vast majority that we will never have heard of. Suffice to say that our DNA, the genes laid down on each strand is a complex pea soup made up of the legacy of an incalculable number of people. So that’s the most obvious legacy that most people leave behind.</p> <p>But there’s also the legacy of our lives. The impacts that we’ve had on the people around us – impacts that ripple laterally across to other people, and vertically down through generations. As an extreme example, it’s reasonable to expect that both historically, and emotionally, Adolf Hitler has had quite a different impact on the world, compared to, say, Mother Theresa. Would you agree? Some people have left astounding legacies behind them – and others have lef