Forever
In the parlance of tween girls, BFF is an honorific without parallel in either connotation or denotation. It supersedes any other honor that might be bestowed, in both intensity--it is best, after all--and in endurance--it is forever. As we all (probably) know, the forever of BFFs all too often turns out to be much more limited than eternity. Growing up in the South, I have become accustomed to hyperbole, to exaggeration for effect, and I have--for the most part--realized when something is and when something is not meant literally. We use the word and the idea of forever in a very haphazard manner--and not just the tween girls among us. We talk about having to wait forever, of having not seen someone in forever, and we never really mean eternity.
As Christians, we live a duality: we do have forever and we don't. We ought to be accustomed to paradoxes, but we really aren't. On the one hand, we have eternal life through the salvation that is ours by the blood of Christ Jesus; on the other hand, we are living here, in this world, for right now, and the life we have here is not eternal. Our problem, sometimes, is that we confuse the two, acting as if we have eternity on earth and as if eternity is something small enough for us to comprehend. Thus, we have two problems stemming from the same word, and we have to come to terms with both of them.
On the one hand, we have the issue of thinking that we have eternity on earth--that our corporal self will last forever. I am, as I write this, on the cusp of turning fifty--a milestone of sorts, to be sure, but also a signal. We are given a limited amount of time on this earth, and we really need to be aware of it. Not morbidly aware, counting down the days until our demise, fixating on death like Emmeline Grangerford in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (Emmeline was the deceased daughter of one of the feuding families Huck encounters when the raft is struck by a steamboat and he is separated from Jim; Emmeline has left behind an impressive body of work, including poetry and paintings, all dealing with death, and in her last painting, an unfinished work, she has drawn a mourning figure with three sets of arms, each set in a different posture of grief, which results in a kind of American folk-art manifestation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.)
We should not immerse ourselves in thoughts of death, but in the reality that we have limited time to do whatever we are supposed to do. We cannot put off everything for that nebulous someday; we have to seize the day. How much of our lives do we spend procrastinating? How many things have we put on hold? We must be aware of the fact that, although we are eternal beings, through Christ, we are temporal beings nonetheless. This applies to things of the earth, things like taking a particular trip or spending time with people we care about doing things we want to do, but it also applies to our Christian selves: we have to be cognizant of how much time we have (or don't have) to take care of the things God has directed us to do during our brief tenure on this particular piece of space rock.
We have been commissioned to perform certain tasks while we are here, and we need to realize that these are not things we can put off indefinitely. We are to live our lives as Christ would live, and that--though never truly attainable--is something we should be doing now. We (or at least I) have a tendency toward putting things off until a more convenient time. That might mean tomorrow, if the thing in question is related to my job; it might mean as far away in future as possible if the thing in question is a chore that I really don't want to do. We often take this same approach to dealing with "chores" we are supposed to be doing as Christians, whether that be sharing the message with those around us or ministering to the needy or loving our enemies. No matter what God might ask us to do, we need to realize that our duty is to embrace that task in a timely manner. We have to be aware of the limitations of time here on earth.
On the other hand, we need to dissuade ourselves of the notion that we can comprehend eternity. We might have a vague, fuzzy idea about it as a concept, but we cannot begin to understand it for what it really is.
Eternity, like its sibling Infinity, is easy enough to grasp as an abstract idea: no matter how far you go, you get to keep adding one--and then another one and another one and so on. Beyond this (and there is a pun lurking somewhere in there), eternity runs in two directions. (Infinity is much more multi-dimensional, running in all directions at once.) While we might be able to wrap our minds around the concept--and that might be iffy--we cannot in any way wrap our heads around the real thing. It is outside our meager abilities.
Buzz Lightyear's motto is "To infinity. . . and beyond." When we first heard this, many years (and a couple of sequels) ago, we probably chuckled. We laughed because we know that there is nothing beyond infinity, that it keeps going forever; to tack on the "and beyond" displays a naivete and a misunderstanding of the idea itself. However, even though we might perceive the humor inherent in the Buzz Lightyear sound bite, we do not always readily recognize that we fall into the same kind of trap when we pretend to comprehend the reality of either infinity or eternity.
The reason this is so important to us as Christians is that, to reiterate a point made elsewhere, we have to be aware of the difference between what we can do and what God can do. God can comprehend infinity; we cannot. God can comprehend eternity; we cannot. This ought to put us properly in our place relative to our relationship with God.
Even though forever is outside our purview as mere mortals, it is still important for us to acknowledge, and not just because it sets a clear boundry between us and God. Eternity puts God in perspective for us, in a weird way, because we can see (at least in theory) how awesome He truly is.
But in another way, forever also serves as a part of the Golden Ticket, for those looking for the reward (and almost all of us do). What is the thing most people really want? Time. Through Christ, we are promised eternity. We get all the time and then some.
Forever is a big thing. But God is bigger.
talk about the idea that we cannot comprehend eternity
To infinity and beyond
As Christians, we live a duality: we do have forever and we don't. We ought to be accustomed to paradoxes, but we really aren't. On the one hand, we have eternal life through the salvation that is ours by the blood of Christ Jesus; on the other hand, we are living here, in this world, for right now, and the life we have here is not eternal. Our problem, sometimes, is that we confuse the two, acting as if we have eternity on earth and as if eternity is something small enough for us to comprehend. Thus, we have two problems stemming from the same word, and we have to come to terms with both of them.
On the one hand, we have the issue of thinking that we have eternity on earth--that our corporal self will last forever. I am, as I write this, on the cusp of turning fifty--a milestone of sorts, to be sure, but also a signal. We are given a limited amount of time on this earth, and we really need to be aware of it. Not morbidly aware, counting down the days until our demise, fixating on death like Emmeline Grangerford in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (Emmeline was the deceased daughter of one of the feuding families Huck encounters when the raft is struck by a steamboat and he is separated from Jim; Emmeline has left behind an impressive body of work, including poetry and paintings, all dealing with death, and in her last painting, an unfinished work, she has drawn a mourning figure with three sets of arms, each set in a different posture of grief, which results in a kind of American folk-art manifestation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.)
We should not immerse ourselves in thoughts of death, but in the reality that we have limited time to do whatever we are supposed to do. We cannot put off everything for that nebulous someday; we have to seize the day. How much of our lives do we spend procrastinating? How many things have we put on hold? We must be aware of the fact that, although we are eternal beings, through Christ, we are temporal beings nonetheless. This applies to things of the earth, things like taking a particular trip or spending time with people we care about doing things we want to do, but it also applies to our Christian selves: we have to be cognizant of how much time we have (or don't have) to take care of the things God has directed us to do during our brief tenure on this particular piece of space rock.
We have been commissioned to perform certain tasks while we are here, and we need to realize that these are not things we can put off indefinitely. We are to live our lives as Christ would live, and that--though never truly attainable--is something we should be doing now. We (or at least I) have a tendency toward putting things off until a more convenient time. That might mean tomorrow, if the thing in question is related to my job; it might mean as far away in future as possible if the thing in question is a chore that I really don't want to do. We often take this same approach to dealing with "chores" we are supposed to be doing as Christians, whether that be sharing the message with those around us or ministering to the needy or loving our enemies. No matter what God might ask us to do, we need to realize that our duty is to embrace that task in a timely manner. We have to be aware of the limitations of time here on earth.
On the other hand, we need to dissuade ourselves of the notion that we can comprehend eternity. We might have a vague, fuzzy idea about it as a concept, but we cannot begin to understand it for what it really is.
Eternity, like its sibling Infinity, is easy enough to grasp as an abstract idea: no matter how far you go, you get to keep adding one--and then another one and another one and so on. Beyond this (and there is a pun lurking somewhere in there), eternity runs in two directions. (Infinity is much more multi-dimensional, running in all directions at once.) While we might be able to wrap our minds around the concept--and that might be iffy--we cannot in any way wrap our heads around the real thing. It is outside our meager abilities.
Buzz Lightyear's motto is "To infinity. . . and beyond." When we first heard this, many years (and a couple of sequels) ago, we probably chuckled. We laughed because we know that there is nothing beyond infinity, that it keeps going forever; to tack on the "and beyond" displays a naivete and a misunderstanding of the idea itself. However, even though we might perceive the humor inherent in the Buzz Lightyear sound bite, we do not always readily recognize that we fall into the same kind of trap when we pretend to comprehend the reality of either infinity or eternity.
The reason this is so important to us as Christians is that, to reiterate a point made elsewhere, we have to be aware of the difference between what we can do and what God can do. God can comprehend infinity; we cannot. God can comprehend eternity; we cannot. This ought to put us properly in our place relative to our relationship with God.
Even though forever is outside our purview as mere mortals, it is still important for us to acknowledge, and not just because it sets a clear boundry between us and God. Eternity puts God in perspective for us, in a weird way, because we can see (at least in theory) how awesome He truly is.
But in another way, forever also serves as a part of the Golden Ticket, for those looking for the reward (and almost all of us do). What is the thing most people really want? Time. Through Christ, we are promised eternity. We get all the time and then some.
Forever is a big thing. But God is bigger.
talk about the idea that we cannot comprehend eternity
To infinity and beyond
posted by Rodney Rhodus | 8:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home