Waiting For What?

I went to get a haircut yesterday.  The barbershop owner in his forties observed that he was no longer young and lamented that he had lost his teenage good-looks.  Unexpectedly, he asked a ponderous question: waiting for what?  No one answered.  More than a day later in my mind, the question still lingers.

Why he asked the question I have no clue.  I suppose there is nothing exciting in his life to look forward to, for every day is mundane, working away to support his family.  I also suppose that he is not Christian or for that matter, a believer in any religion.

When life is taken for granted, when it is seen as a time spent in a vapid wasteland of recycled existence that leads nowhere, when it is lived without regular self-examinations of conscience in order to better oneself, to rest in God the hope of being a person of humility and charity, then life's future would surely be plain without meaning and hope, like a blank canvas with no image and no color that is as large as life is long placed before an uninspired artist with no talent and no imagination.

One does not want to own a canvas for life and be the artist without an iota of inspiration staring at it year after year waiting for something to happen because nothing will.

Thus the question, waiting for what, may have an answer after all: waiting for the rays of gratitude for the gift of life to emanate from within to shine upon one's canvas through the prism of a unique and irreplaceable existence that is each of us to cast upon it multidimensional images in a heavenly mixture of colors that changes continuously and varies from gloomy to spectacular, depending on the extent of one's of holiness at any given moment.

One must then ask: is it better to have a blank canvas at the end of life than one covered with stains of Sin of all kinds?

I would personally rather have a canvas stained with regretted sins than one unmarked by any acknowledgement of God and all the struggles between good and evil that one engaged in throughout life.  At the gates of Heaven and Hell, if I had no perfection to present, at least my battle scars would show, even if I had lost and evil had won.  With God's forgiveness, hopefully the Gate of Heaven will open.  That is what everyone is waiting for, whether anyone wants to admit it or not.