Scripture
‘Woe to me! The LORD has added sorrow to my pain; I am worn out with groaning and find no rest.’
~Jeremiah 45:3, NIV
Quote
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
~Thomas Moore
There are a couple of things that young people don’t give a lot a thought to: growing old and heaven. They gave me an over the hill party at age 40 and I laughed at them–I thought the whole idea was silly but it was not many years after that I begin to realize there was a chance that I would get old. As a young person, I never dreamed of living to the millennium [2000] and now it is nineteen years later and I have reached the infamous three score and ten. Now time literally flies and many of my friends have already departed this world. We had Mark Byrd and his group do a concert at Grace Point yesterday morning and three or four of their songs were about heaven. I enjoyed them all.
I don’t know what heaven is like, no one does but I focus on the things that will not be there: Death, sin, sorrow, grief, pain, heartbreak, guilt, restlessness, war, hate, envy, jealously to name a few. These are things I can gladly live without. Last night I got a phone call from a grieving mother. She asks me to carry her through the steps of grief and I had to confess, I didn’t know them. I do know that when we face traumatic loss, we go into shock and unless you have been there, I can’t explain it. It is like a dream. After the shock, reality sits in and then loneliness. Grief has a way of isolating us which is why it is so important to comfort the grieving with our presence. C. S. Lewis knew a lot about grief; he lost his mother as a child, his father as a teenager and his wife after only four years of marriage. He said the worse thing about grief is it’s relentlessness. It never stops hounding you and it stays on your heels every waking moment.
Dallas Willard is one of my favorite authors. He failed to make it through a difficult surgery in 2013. The last person he talked to on earth was his granddaughter and his last words to her was “Give them heaven,”which is so much better than the alternative. Three little boys were bragging about their daddy’s property. The doctor’s kid said, “My daddy owes an entire city block.” The lawyers kid said, “that’s nothing, my daddy is in real estate and he owes more houses than you can count.” The preacher’s kid was taxing his brain, finally he spoke up, “Why that is nothing, my daddy owes hell.” “You must be mistaken,” said the other two; “what makes you think your daddy owes hell?” The preacher’s kid said, “He come home after a deacons meeting the other night and my mom asked him how it went and he said, ‘They gave me hell.'”
Don’t forget the Tommy Tuberville meeting this Thursday at Libby’s at 12:00 noon. They are giving more heat for this week: maybe this will be the last week of extreme heat. I’m sure glad God created seasons for North America.