Temporary

Job 14:1-2. I’ve been thinking lately about how everything is temporary. I drive by a spot where a house used to be, and now all that’s left is the sidewalk going to where the front door was, and the driveway stopping where the garage was. Otherwise the entire lot is covered with grass. Neighbors and OSU chop down lovely big old trees and I mourn every time. I love a good tree, and they’re supposed to last for a very long time, but in reality they are only temporary.

People, shockingly, are temporary too. My parents, three of my pregnancies, an old boyfriend, my senior prom date, Mark, Chuck--all gone, and many more to follow. If I die first, then I can pretend that Stu will go on forever, and it’s unbearable to think that he might have the nerve to die before I do. Thinking about this, I felt like I was stuck in Ecclesiastes. It was depressing. Something deep inside me feels like this is just wrong.

Many times I am able to get through bad situations with a semblance of sanity because I put them in the perspective of time. You can do, or put up with, just about anything if you know it’s temporary. So temporary can be a good thing too.

Thinking about all the things that are temporary naturally led me to thoughts of things that are permanent. Funny, there isn’t nearly as much on that list. There are two passages that come to mind--I Peter 1:23-25 and 2 Corinthians 4:17-18.

Everything we see is temporary. Everything. Even Planet Earth. Things we can’t see are forever. If the eternal things are evil, that’s a situation totally devoid of hope, and a perfectly valid reason for panic and despair. But if the eternal things, like God, are good, that’s wonderful. Actually, wonderful is much too mild a word, isn’t it? To be honest, I can’t think of a word in English that stands up to the task of describing permanent total goodness.

Did you ever look up the word “forever” in a big concordance? It takes up about four columns, and a lot of that is from Psalms and Revelation. Some of the Forever verses are about evil beings being tormented forever. Many more of them are about Good--Jesus having glory and dominion forever, God living forever, the two of them reigning forever. Permanent Good. And us, and those fellow believers that we have lost, being found by God, and never again having to say of a bad situation, “I can endure this, it’s only temporary”.

Love, Spud