Reflecting On Being 1/4 Of The Way Home

Have you ever been in the mountains during summer? If you can find it in yourself to go outside of your tent into the feezing temperatures of early morning you will find that there is a gentle mist settled on everything. Over the fields of manzania bush, fields of rocks, and ponds and streams, there hangs a mist. It is beautiful. But when the sun comes up and the air warms up, the mist vanishes in seconds.

Today I turn 21. This is the age where most kids are legal to drink. Some Christian kids can finally drink, and most kids get bored with drinking because its not illegal anymore. This is the legal age where you more or less can do anything you want to do (except rent a car) and there are no legal repurcussions.

And here I sit. Not 10 months ago I would have gone and had a few drinks. But life has completely changed. Life is totally different.

James says, "You do not know what tomarrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes" (James 4:14). I think I can say that I understand this quite a lot better now. I'm not an old and hardened life veteren, but I get it a little better. If I live my life like a fool, like most of the world is living it drowned in a cool pitcher of Coors, I will look up at 77.6 years old (the average american male life span) and realize I wasted it. I have instead a terrifying promise found in Matthew 24:45-51,

"Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you, he will set him over all his posessions. But if that wicked servant says to himself, 'My master is delayed,' and begins to beat his fellow servants and eats and drinks with drunkards, the master of that servant wil come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know and will cut him to pieces and put him with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Life is a serious thing. We are not made to sit around and drink and get drunk and play poker and do little trivial things but to serve the Master. I was not made to waste hours surfing the internet for useless pieces of trivia. I was not made to shop at the mall for shoes hour after hour. I was not made to make a life built on the sinking sand of a high paying career. More than all things I must serve the Master. He has set us over His creation and now we must serve Him.

But then there also lies the promise of a wonderful eternity. Hebrews 6:11-12 says for "each one of you to show the same diligence to have full assurance of hope until the end, so that you will not be sluggish but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises." What is the hope laid out in that verse? Its in the end of the chapter in verse 19-20, "We have this [hope] as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone, as a forerunner on our behalf." Jesus promised by a God who cannot lie and has sworn and promised to us the hope of His Son. I have a hope for the end of my life. I have an anchor for the end of my life.

I may be 1/4 of the way to paradise today and if what James says is true I may be mere seconds from death. I may almost be home. James promises us that this is a wisp, a quickly passing life. I dare not get lazy and drunk and think that the Master is not coming home soon but I also dare to lay hold of the hope of an unchanging hopeful God who has promised us an eternity of happiness in Jesus.

For The Glory Of An Unchanging Swearing Promising God,
R.D. Thompson