This is a special, extra post. I will be developing these themes next month, but I thought I should publish this one early. I have a friend who might need to read it now instead of waiting until August.
Imagine for a moment that the universe consisted of you and two other people. As far as the three of you know no one else exists. Then one day the universe goes crazy. It begins to spasm and shake until, suddenly, one of you is gone. You have no idea where the other person went or if you will ever be with them again.
What have I just described? The beginning of the birth of triplets. They are aware of each other while they are in the womb. Then, suddenly, one of them is gone. I suspect that if we could attach the proper electrodes to the heads of the three babies we would find out that the separation as the first baby leaves the womb is traumatic for all three. But from our perspective, understanding the universe in a way the triplets simply can’t, we wouldn’t feel too much empathy for their emotional distress. We know that in a very, very short time the three babies will be back together again lying side by side.
Let’s leave the three babies at the hospital for a moment while we talk about how we experience time. While time doesn’t change, the way we experience it alters dramatically. The younger you are, the slower time seems to go. I can look back on one Christmas in particular, where it seemed like the period of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas lasted about three and a half years.
That same period of time just flies by as an adult. Indeed, many of us might wish that the time would slow down so that we could get everything done in time for the holidays. We have gifts to buy and trees to put up and decorate. The time seems to go so swiftly.
I have reason to believe that this sense of time speeding up never stops as long as we are in this life. I am in my mid-fifties right now, and in the last few years time seems to be going by so quickly that months seem like weeks to me now. I use this to my advantage. I feel like I am never more than 12 weeks away from my vacation. If my vacation is in July, and I am feeling a little tired and in need of a break in April, I remind myself that it will seem like my vacation is only three weeks away. The actual time is three months, but subjectively, it will feel like three weeks to me.
A couple of years ago I asked my then 82 year old father if my sense of time would begin to slow back down when I retired. In retirement we have fewer demands on our time and fewer deadlines. I was surprised when my father told me that time seemed to be flying by even more quickly during his retirement years than it did while he was working.
The older you get, the quicker time seems to go by. Let’s keep that in mind, along with our triplets waiting for us in the hospital, while we think about what it would be like to get hit by a bus.
I was riding my bike about a year ago when I went by a bus depot. All of a sudden this thought popped into my mind: what would happen if I got hit by a bus and was instantly killed? Over the years I have come to recognize that when the Holy Spirit wants to teach me something, He will often begin the lesson by putting a question into my mind.
My first thought was not very profound or spiritual: “If I die right now, who is going to do all those items on my to-do list?” I had just started a new job and my mind was constantly focusing on all the new tasks I needed to learn. But I quickly moved on to thing about more important matters.
How could heaven be heaven if my wife wasn’t there? How could I be happy to go if I had to leave her behind? How could I rejoice if I knew that she was sorrowing? Interesting questions, are they not? Here are some of the things the Holy Spirit brought to my mind to answer those questions.
First, the sorrow is inevitable. My dream would be for us to die together in our sleep some night when we are both in our eighties, but the odds of that happening aren’t good. I can remember a moment, early in our marriage, when I was thinking about this problem, and my conclusion was that we were in a heap of trouble. I was beginning to understand that the bond in marriage was much, much deeper than I had expected it to be. I had seemed to get by just fine for the first 24 years of my life without a wife, but now, all of a sudden, I needed to be with that woman in almost the same way I needed oxygen. She had become emotionally essential to me, and someday one of us would have to go first, and the other one would be devastated.
But that sorrow is part of the package we signed up for. We committed to “until death do us part.” One of us will some day have to pay a price in sorrow for the joy that we have shared. It is inevitable. And in the moment of death, one of the first realizations that must come upon us is the awareness that, if God were to allow us to come back to our physical life, we would only be postponing the sorrow. Sooner or later, one of us will have to pay. It’s inevitable.
The second thought that I had was that a group of people were going to be disappointed no matter what I did. Let me put it to you this way. If my mom knows I’m coming, she’s going to bake a cake and put up some crepe paper in a room somewhere; or she is going to do whatever is the heavenly equivalent of that. So let’s say that I find myself standing beside my crushed bike and my poor, squashed body someday, coming to terms with the fact that my earthly life is over. If I appeal to God, and He decides to do a miracle and lets me come back, some people in heaven are going to be disappointed. It won’t be a big blow for them to have to wait a little longer, but it will still be a reunion postponed.
The third thought I had was that, even if God didn’t let me come back so that I could have some more time with her, that we would only be parted for a moment or two. Remember, the older you get the faster time seems to go by. It was as if the Holy Spirit was saying to me that in the moment of death, your mind goes through and adjustment that lets you see clearly some things that you should have been seeing all along.
The first thing we will clearly see if that this earthly life was supposed to be a pilgrimage. A pilgrim is someone who is on a journey to someplace else. He never completely settles down where he’s at until he arrives at this final destination. You and I are on a journey to a heavenly country. We were never meant to completely settle down here. We should never allow our hearts to become too attached to this place.
We can keep the right attitude by living for the heavenly reward. If I live for the glory of God today and if I invest a portion of my income in His kingdom, I will arrive in that heavenly country in style. There will be rewards waiting for me. Some will have to do with honor and recognition and some of them will probably be material in nature. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The more we invest in our heavenly future, the more real it will become to us.
The second thing we will clearly see is the true extent of our everlasting life span. I used to tell people that we have a life span that you could only begin to measure in units of billions of years. Let me tell you a profound and exciting truth. At some point, we run out of words to describe numbers. I know about billions and trillions. I suppose there are numbers even larger than that, but at some point the mathematicians had to quit. There would be no point in inventing names for numbers that no one in this life would ever use. I don’t know what the name of the largest number in the English language is, but I do know that someday you will have a birthday where the total number of years of your life will be bigger than that number. Bigger than a thousand, which is 10 hundreds of years. Bigger than a million, which is 1,000 thousands of years. Bigger than a billion, which is 1,000 millions of years. Bigger than a trillion, which is 1,000 billions of years.
In this life, if we haven’t had our hearts and minds renewed by the Holy Spirit through the word, we are like the triplets as they are being born. Something is happening. They don’t understand it and they are upset because one of them is suddenly gone from the only universe they know.
But in that heavenly country, the perspective is much like that of the adults in the birthing room waiting for the other two babies to be born. We just have to wait a few minutes more minutes and the other two babies will be along.
They will meet us in that heavenly country and they will comfort us by saying, “Just be patient. The people you love on the earth will be along soon. It won’t seem to take any time at all.” And as they comfort us, we will see clearly and we will understand. They’ll be coming to join us any minute now. And it won’t seem like a long time at all.
