By: Carolyn Gard
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
Having been to yet another memorial service, I got to thinking about the words that are often spoken there, ‘eternal life.’ Just what do we mean by eternal life? If you’ve read Tuck Everlasting, (a highly recommended kid’s book by Natalie Babbitt), you know that eternal life here on earth is not all it’s cracked up to be.
We do a lot of things on earth: have jobs, fix meals, raise children, go on vacations, read, indulge in hobbies, go out to dinner. Things we probably won’t have to do in eternal life. So what will we do? Well, some have suggested that we could talk with great people of the past. Ask Shakespeare if he really wrote all those plays. Tell Martin Luther King, Jr., how much we admire him. Ask Abraham Lincoln if he realized what he had done when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Find out if Noah really built an ark and rescued the animals. Maybe we will get to read all the books we never had time to read, or finally understand quantum physics. But will this be enough?
We refer to many things on earth as an eternity—waiting for Santa Claus, keeping 25 third-graders quiet while they wait to go to the music room, waiting for the results of medical tests. But, in contrast to eternal life, these earthly eternities finally end. Eternal life is eternal, forever, a concept totally foreign to us. So, the question remains, will there be enough to do in eternal life?
And then I came up with another question, one that might be considered heresy in some circles. Does God ever get bored? The universe is going along fine by itself as it has for billions of years, except for the way that we keep trying to destroy the Earth. God gave us free will, so we keep stumbling along on our own and God refrains from telling us that we’re being stupid. God must understand quantum physics; what else does God have to learn?
A recommendation—don’t think about these things when you wake up at 2:00 in the morning if you have any hope of getting back to sleep. As long as we’re here on Earth we probably won’t come up with the answers to our questions about eternal life. Maybe the answer is the words of the hymn “…unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”
God, help us to have the faith in you that we may understand that many wonders lie ahead.
