Perhaps scares isn’t quite the right word; overwhelms might be a better term. I’m not talking about heaven: the place – but eternity: the never ending measure of time. It’s something I can’t quite wrap my mind around. We live in a world of the finite – things will not always be the way they are. That can be a comfort when things are bad; a sadness when things are good. We even know that our lives here will eventually end. There is no frame of reference for time that is infinite.
Usually I can think of, or speak of, eternity just fine. It’s a familiar description of what happens in the hereafter. However, at other times that attempt to deeply comprehend the meaning of eternity – being somewhere for a truly unlimited time – sneaks in. It is like trying to picture what eternity will be like. I start to feel a tightness in my chest, a breathlessness – and try to think of something else immediately. Maybe it is just that eternity is something too vast for my limited thoughts to grasp.
It’s something I feel weird talking about – what if nobody else thinks like this? Or when I die, will God be offended that eternity makes me nervous? When it comes right down to it I don’t believe that. Apprehension of the unknown is natural – and eternity is perhaps the ultimate unknown. I trust that God understands even better than I that the unknown can make me nervous, and He won’t hold it against me.
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