When he began his career, he was a seventeen-year-old refugee who had $100 in his pocket and an unquenchable desire to succeed in life. His family had lost a huge fortune when they were forced to flee their homeland, and now he had arrived half way around the world in South America attempting to start over.
Within five years, he had not only earned his first million, he had refined his skills and developed a reputation as a ruthless, determined, and fearless man. The world was going to hear a lot more about this man.
He lived his life surrounded by luxury and beautiful women, and was devoted to pagan pleasures and a hedonistic lifestyle. At the pinnacle of his power, in 1973, his estimated worth was more than one billion dollars. This included immense real estate holdings, a priceless art collection, and the world’s most luxurious yacht.
His marital and extramarital affairs were the talk of the world’s press, and in 1968 he shocked the world by marrying the widow of an assassinated American president. The philosophy of Aristotle Onassis was captured in one succinct statement: “All that really counts these days is money. It’s the people with money who are the royalty now.”
It was at this point that his world crumbled. In 1973, his twenty-four-year-old son, Alexander, was killed in a plane crash. And when he died, so did Aristotle Onassis’s reason for living. He was never the same after that. According to his biographer, “Onassis seemed to lose all hope with the death of Alexander. Alexander was his hope and he said to everyone that he could see no sense in living any longer.”
Time Magazine quoted one of his associates as saying, “He aged overnight. He suddenly became an old man. In business negotiations, he was uncharacteristically absent-minded, irrational, and petulant.”
His health very quickly began to fail and rumors spread that guilt and grief for his son had dulled his sharp business acumen. A combination of his apparent loss of interest, the Arab oil embargo, and some uncharacteristically bad decisions drove his fortune down from one billion dollars to somewhere between 200 and 500 million in one year’s time. Not long thereafter, Onassis himself died.
It is a sad story. It is the kind of story that is happening every day in our world where people invest their lives in things that do not last. As one writer at the time commented, “He was a man who prided himself in getting everything he ever really wanted in his life, but he was often morose, misanthropic, and acrimonious. He continually followed one tenet of his own religion at all costs – to fulfill his own well-being, and yet he only truly wanted what he could not purchase.”
I am reminded of the message on a wall plaque that that I have seen:
“Only one life, ‘twill soon be past.
Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
It is a plaque well worth hanging on the walls of every heart. If your world revolves around the acquisition of material things, you would do well to recognize that things do not last. What you have accumulated and have built your life around – all of it – will be left behind when you come to the end of your earthly journey.
The Paper Pulpit 
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