Life begins with great fanfare. The occasion of a birth fills the family and the church and the whole community with joy and thanksgiving -- and rightfully so! The gift of a child from God is meant to be a great event worthy of great celebration. After the birth, the anniversaries of that entrance into life are measured first in weeks and then in months and finally in years. Each of them struggles to be bigger and better than the other. Some of them are met with a combination of joy and trepidation -- such as that day when the child leaves the home for preschool or school.
Once the child enters school, the celebrations continue with the same speed. From preschool graduation to kindergarten graduation merely one year later! Then a graduation from elementary school. Then a few short years and a middle school graduation. And then high school and college graduations come almost right on schedule (though the college one may take six instead of the usual four years). Alone the way we celebrate other milestones that once came with the same quick timeline. Engagement and then marriage and then children are all the early markers of great accomplishment. I have not even mentioned the first full-time job, the first promotion, the first car, the first house -- among a thousand of other firsts to be celebrated in life.
But then things slow down. You celebrate but from a bit of a distance some of the same things -- graduations, marriages, grandchildren, etc... They are yours to celebrate but these milestones of achievement are not quite yours. They quite rightly belong to others. The occasions to recognize, honor, and reward achievements come very slowly in later life. Years pass before you get to the invention of retirement and the opportunity to be useless. To put it more accurately, you retire from work so that you can be free to attend countless medical appointments and undergo procedures for physical ills you never even thought about until you hit that magical age of retirement.
After retirement, the issue turns to downsizing -- the Swedish death cleaning I referenced in an earlier blog post. After spending our lives collecting, we wake up one day to find out nobody wants our stuff -- not even the familial treasures we were so happy to have received from our parents and grandparents. Then commences the job of getting rid of our stuff -- not just the no longer useful kitchenware and decorator items or the clothing we have not worn in ages but family photos no longer valued in a digital world and the mementos of our achievements in plaques and watches and trinkets given by those once so deeply appreciate of who we are. The next and final task is to prepare for our death -- the financial affairs to be put in order and the place for our remains decided and the cost of the arrangements dutifully paid in advance so that we will not have to trouble our heirs with such and they can get back to their lives with as little disruption as possible.
Heaven is not an option -- it is the rescue of a people whose lives slow, whose vision dims, whose bodies decline, and whose glories fade. When it seems that we have nothing at all to look forward to, God sweeps into our despair and lifts our eyes to a future unimaginable and beyond our expectation. Heaven is not some little bitty consolation prize for the loss of something great and grand, it is the great and grand that makes this life -- as wonderful as it can be -- pale in comparison. Heaven is not a whimper at the end of a bang but the bang that makes the present noise seem like a whimper. Heaven does not diminish this life in order to be great but its greatness automatically diminishes what went before. We become like the children again -- with attention to what is coming and not simply what came. And this future is not something of our own creation or design or accomplishment -- it is the gift once given to the child in the font who now faces the wrinkles, gray hair, and chronic aches and ailments. Heaven is THE gift and not a gift. Heaven is not the pie in the sky when you die but the gift of God that on earth we cannot fathom until in heaven we awaken in possession of this gift forever. If we are blessed, we will awaken to this as we meet the inevitable trials and troubles of age, frailty of body and mind, and the world distracted by the occasions and interests of youth. We need heaven. Heaven does not need us. Perhaps that is what I began to discover while awaiting a preschool graduation. If so, thanks be to God!
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