Blog

Observation

I live like there is only today. “NOW” screams the world. “I want it now”, “I need it now”, “I can’t wait”, “I don’t have enough time”. Eternity no longer has a voice to speak into my today. Instead, these ‘NOW’ stories are shaping our lives.

My life seems to be what is in front of me. I fail to shape it upon what waits beyond,  unseen and ‘later’. I do not see my life in light of eternity. I am caught in the temporary of today not the eternal promises of what is to come. The five minutes that is this life is not shaped by my eternal life. I live like I only have five minutes and the clock is running.

I live like there is only today. So when today does not yield to me all the pleasure, opportunity, joy, life that I have convinced myself I deserve, and have decided that God if he is a good God, would give to me, then I fall into a heap of despair and depression, and write the overflow stories of ‘unfair’, ‘woe is me’, ‘God is a bad God’. 

I must see life through a new story; “We view our slight, short-lived troubles in the light of eternity.” Try this story: ‘everything you are going through is as temporary as a summer storm, it may be ferocious, but it’s wind and rain will cease shortly and the glory of the sun will then shine on you forever’. Steeped in this story I will weather the storm. I will praise God for His goodness to me in the gift of eternity, and look to bring him glory in the storm. Eternity as my shaping story changes the way I walk out today’s troubles and pleasures. All is temporary. All pain will cease, and all pleasure is but a crumb of what awaits me in eternity. 

Application

Give voice to eternity. Shape today on eternity’s certainty. Stop demanding from today what is assured in eternity.

This broken, fallen world will not yield the life and pleasure we are wired to desire, for the desire in us is designed to point us to eternity not to make demands of today.

We are demanding gold from a silver mine and being disappointed by what we find. Change the story. Know that gold is guaranteed in the future, unseen world, and live in this knowledge – it will change the way I see the silver of today. Stop demanding from God that he deliver the life he has guaranteed in eternity. He never promised that. He assured us that the broken fallen world would yield us unfair, unwanted, undeserved and deserved trouble and affliction. Stop being so surprised. Stop complaining and blaming and start to shape the five minutes in this fallenness in the light of the fullness of eternity. 

Response

Thank you for eternity, it’s promise to me in the troubles of today. To know the beauty of eternity and the assuredness of my place is the richest blessing this life could ever yield. Help me shape today on eternity. There is no greater shaping gift for this life than to understand its temporary fallen nature and to demand from it only what it is able to give. I am a blessed man, eternity is already mine!

Meditation

Spend some time in meditation. Thank Jesus for your place in eternity. Let this future shape your today.