Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Lost in Thoughts of Eternity

 
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Psalm 93:1-5

The Lord is king! He is robed in majesty.  Indeed, the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength.  The world stands firm and cannot be shaken.  Your throne, O Lord, has stood from time immemorial.  You yourself are from the everlasting past.  The floods have risen up, O Lord.  The floods have roared like thunder; the floods have lifted their pounding waves.  But mightier than the violent raging of the seas, mightier than the breakers on the shore—the Lord above is mightier than these!  Your royal laws cannot be changed.  Your reign, O Lord, is holy forever and ever.

My children have no memory of me.  That is, they have no memory of me before they were born.  They only have what they have seen in pictures and been told by me, and others, of what I was like before they were born.  
They might be able to pick out their father, or name their uncle and his cousins entirely based on family resemblance, but it’s a guess, not a memory; they weren’t there in 1950.
My children’s children (and grandchildren) have no first-hand knowledge of what their parents were like before they were born.  And so on. 
The memory we all have of the time before our time exists, resting entirely on the faith we have in what we are told, and by whom it is who tells us.
In the same way, we can only imagine eternity.  And it somewhat hurts the head to do so.  If you’ve ever tried to imagine nothingness, as if nothing existed, such as Genesis suggests, you understand this head-hurting activity:

The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters.  Genesis 1:2a

Pondering eternity can produce a wide range of emotions among the vast possibilities; we can get overwhelmed with awe for the vastness of time and space. Depression is also possible, because of the prospect of an unanswerable line of questioning about our beginning; to think deeply and run into the same, frustrating answer, we’ll see, or maybe is a sure formula for a straight jacket. 
And those straight jackets come in many colors and sizes.  Of the many ones we put on, (perhaps as an intentional insulation against the cold, dark, reality of our questions being unanswerable) is the common agnostic approach, simply throwing hands up in the air, admitting:  well…no one can really know how it all began; you can’t prove God or creation, or something nobody was there to see…so why bother even thinking about it?  Some like to think that is an “intelligent” position of accepting your losses and moving on.
Nonetheless, the quest to know from whence we trod remains fundamental to humankind, because we desire to know purpose, the WHY of our existance.  To NOT at least ponder these is to live in a shallow pool of self-importantance.
Enter – the loveliness of faith.
Somewhere in the deepest crevices of our being, even deeper than DNA, and more pronounced than personality, there is singing a song of our origin, the music and message of our Creator’s love.  This song calls out to the individual from within.  It cries a thornbird’s gift as Fr. Alfred McBride wrote:
“According to legend, the thorn bird sings just once in its life. Leaving its nest, it searches for a bush with long, sharp thorns. Upon finding such a bush it impales itself on the biggest thorn. At that moment it begins to sing.
“The bird out-carols the lark and the nightingale and the world pauses to listen. God smiles with pleasure at the captivating melody. What is the message of this sacrificial music? Life's most satisfying moment can be purchased only at the price of great pain – so says the legend.
[1]
Christ on the cross, was our thorn bird.  This was Father God’s precious gift that causes our souls to sing, All glory to the dying lamb…sweetest note in seraph song.[2]
For You Today
You have no memory of the creation, or Christ’s cross, or even your great-great grandfather; you DO have a song of faith waiting to be sung…an eternal song.
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today.  Have a blessed day!
Title Image:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
For another post on Psalm 93 see God Sovereign - Part 1

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