My old Sanyo radio died last week.

I use the word “died” figuratively, of course. I simply mean that the radio stopped working completely, and seems disinclined to start working again in the near future, to the degree that a once-functional electronic device has been reduced to a very large paperweight.

This event is of note only because of the age of the radio and the history it and I have shared together. I’d owned this particular radio for almost exactly 30 years. I received it as a gift for either my birthday or Christmas (given that those two celebrations are six days apart, you’ll forgive me if I sometimes run them together) in 1974, when my parents and I were living in the Philippines.

Originally, the device also played cassette tapes, but the tape player quit working at least two decades ago. The radio, however, has given me excellent service spanning six Presidential administrations. For much of that time, it was my constant nighttime companion, bringing to my ears everything from Giants baseball to Dr. Demento’s comedy program. More recently, it has occupied a place of honor on our bathroom counter, where it boomed out news, sports, and Face the Nation while I showered.

Now, like grandfather’s proverbial clock, it has stopped short, never to go again.

Due to the transitory nature of my military childhood, and to the disposable quality of consumer goods in general, I don’t own very many old things. I own nothing else except this radio that has been in near-constant use for three decades. I’ve known this piece of equipment longer than I’ve known my wife, and I can barely recall a time when I didn’t know her.

But the next time the sanitation company picks up our trash, away the radio will go.

If I’ve learned anything in the 43 years (as of today) that God has shown grace to grant me life, it is that nothing we own on earth is permanent. We use things up, or wear them out, or they up and die on us, sometimes when we least expect them to do so. Even radios that have squawked away merrily for nearly three-fourths of a lifetime give up the electronic ghost sooner or later. And nothing we do can change that reality.

Many years ago, brother Tillit S. Teddlie penned these marvelous words in a hymn:

Earth holds no treasures but perish with using
However precious they be—
Yet there’s a country to which I am going:
Heaven holds all to me.

Long before those lines were written, the Lord Jesus had taught, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21).

We must keep in mind that, just as the things of this world come and go, so too do our physical lives. There will arrive a day for each of us when our mortal bodies will lie as lifeless as my old radio now does. When that day comes, we will either have invested a treasure in heaven and begin to reap it, or we will have invested our souls in eternal condemnation, and begin to reap that (Matthew 25:46).

Losing a radio is not as perilous as losing a soul. I can always buy another radio. Souls come one to a customer. If you lose the one you have, you’ve lost everything that matters (Matthew 16:26). Therefore, we should master the art of being content with whatever we have, whether little or much (Philippians 4:11-13), and when the things of the world depart, recall that when we entered this world, we did so with nothing (Job 1:21; Ecclesiastes 5:15).