How Morbid and True...

We're packing up. We're giving things away. I feel a little sad. I read these paragraphs the other day from a box of notes that ended up in the recycling bin. I felt a little morbid reading this and then I found it to be true as well...

From one point of view, the whole of life may be seen as a taking away, as one long and painful series of subtractions. We are forever being called upong to pull up stakes, to release our hold upon the things and places and people we have loved, an even upon each precious second as it slips through our aging fingers. Our very bodies are like tents, says Paul in his letter to Corinth, the most temporary of houses, and our whole existence under the sun bears the marks of exile and nomadism. If we are lucky enough to survive into old age, it will only be to find that even the most basic amenities of life will begin to be withdrawn from us one by one: legal freedoms, good health, friends, the comforts of our own home, physical and intellectual abilities, the capacity to think clearly, remember things, read a book, walk around the block, enjoy food, go to the bathroom. An old man is a ruined city, a fallen kingdom, a disaster are full of leaks and potholes and crumbling walls. In the end there may be nothing left to him but life itself, the faintest squiggle on a piece of graph paper, and even that may be unceremoniously flicked away like a speck of lint from the collar of the dashing young world.

There is no escaping this fate...

What? This is so morbid. I stopped reading right there, but I hope the author goes on. I hope he then writes...

But for those who know Him, for those who have called upon His name, a hope lies at the end. You will come to a place where there is no weeping or gnashing of teeth. You will come to a place that is perfect because the author or life dwells there. And you will dwell and live with Him. In the garden He would only visit. After the fall, He was present in Spirit only, except for a brief time that He came as one of us. But in eternity, we will dwell with Him. Forever. And things will be perfect. What was lost, will be restored. What needs redemption, will be redeemed. That whatever you have given up in this life, your home, your cute paisley and green shirt, your Strawberry Shortcake watch that you've had since you were five, etc. there will be a sense of restoration... you will be in a place where the giving up of those things is now made perfect.

But that was just what I would have written. Here's what he wrote...

By waging so pitiful a struggle not to become obsolete, when in reality the whole natural flow of physical life is toward obsolescence, what people really do is to declare a preference for temporal values over eternal ones. What they do, in fact, is to reject the Kingdom of God and its gift of eternal life. As it turns out, the only way not to reject eternal values is to submit willingly to the erosion of temporal ones. A spirit of graceful submission is required of every person in life, and there can be no peace without it. For one way or another we must all be humbled, even unto death. One way or another we must all die a little every day, and in the process we will all suffer unspeakably.

Hmm...I like what he wrote, there's truth there. But I like what I wrote better. It's more hopeful...it surrenders, I think, to the great eternal value I am strengthened by each day. Hope. Hope in my King who is to come and who will one day rule perfectly. Hope not in what I gave up, but Hope that one day it will not matter that I gave it up. Because He has made all things new and the world has been completely redeemed. I look forward to that day...but for today, I will probably experience more of what that author wrote. So I will keep pulling up my stakes, releasing my hold on the people, places and things I love. But I will do so with hope...