On my way to heaven, I stumbled upon this truth…we will die one day; so don’t forget to live. Last week, I was going to work in the morning on a usual busy weekday and was cruising at a speed of about 70 km in a 90 km highway. I was on the heavy vehicle lane on the extreme left so I was not hogging the road. Neither was I travelling fast in the normal estimation of a Singaporean driver. At this speed of 70 km, I was naturally the slowest of the 1600 cc vehicular traffic. I counted all the cars that sped past me that morning and they numbered an average of 5 to 6 every few seconds. The drivers seemed mindfully preoccupied and awfully busy.
Those cars which started off together with me on the highway were way ahead of me and those cars which started way behind me had already had a comfortable lead ahead of me. That morning, I was indeed the slowest of them all. If this had been the hare and tortoise race, I would have definitely been the proverbial tortoise, taking its own sweet time to get to the finishing line. And on that day, there were a lot of hares on the expressway.
As the cars hurried past me, I started to think about life in general. We are indeed very busy people, whether on the road or in the office. Even at home, we have our nanny duties all stacked up for us. Those parents with children know very well that their little precious tots are, by nature, attention-seeking monsters. They don’t just want attention from you; they suck it dry!
We are born into a busy life. Our agenda is usually packed. Our schedule is all filled up. Even when we are not busy physically; we are kept busy mentally. Our thoughts are like little sport cars in our labyrinth neural highway. Our brain never sleeps. Our conscious or unconscious thoughts, our worries and concerns, our dreams and hopes, our fears and suspicion all clamor for our attention during our waking moments.
Considering that we will die one day, and for some, in the very near future, some of us strangely carry a cavalier attitude towards our impending death and the life thereafter. Somehow, death seems to be an alien concept to the young and the young at heart. Somehow, death scares not the rich since the pleasures of life have effectively insulated them from the sobriety that the thought of one’s imminent death would naturally bring. Somehow, death as a wake-up call is categorized as a social taboo reserved for the superstitious and the religious – not for the young, the well-off and the hot-bloodedly ambitious. An atheist always sees death as the end of all – so they live their life as best as they can before they call it a day…one day.
I believe there are different stages of growth in our life. And the last stage of growth is death. Since the learning never ceased until we die, death can be viewed as the last lesson for the dying. But the lesson for the dying is always more profound and more sobering. They do not fuss with the inconsequential or the petty issues of life. Generally, you can ask a person, who is about to die, about life and he will tell you only two things: get right with yourself and get right with others. Only when these two issues are settled, if they are ever settled, that is, would the dying then deal with their possession, make a will or go for a tour.
Relationships matter - that the last lesson for the dying, the last stage of their growth. On earth, our relationship with our loved ones counts for everything before our mortal shell expires. Then, comes the issue of the afterlife. I believe that what survives our death is us. Yes, us, the one writing and reading these words. We are created in God’s image and that image is our spirit that reflects our creator. Our spirit is imperishable, inextinguishable. It survives death because it is an eternal entity that makes us who we are. We are thus earmarked for eternity whether we believe it or not. In the book of Ecclesiastes 3:10-11, it reads, “I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has…set eternity in their hearts.”
In 2004, a renowned atheist philosopher and a mortalist (someone who does not believe in the afterlife) crossed over the existential line. At age 81, Professor Antony Flew made the following declaration to the public, “I now believe there is a God!” A little background about Professor Flew will show that he is the least likely of intellectuals to subscribe to the belief in God. For more than 50 years, Professor Flew denounced religion as irrational and illogical. He wrote books refuting the belief in God and his writings set the agenda for the growth of modern atheism. Many well known atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins and Journalist Christopher Hitchens owed it to Professor Flew for his years of systematic debunking of religion and all its flawed doctrine on the deity of God.
But all this changed in December 2004 when Professor Flew opened his mind and heart to the Creator’s still small voice. What is so amazing about his conversion is that he now finds that the belief in God and the afterlife are logically defensible. God is no longer a myth, a superstition or a fairy tale to him. The universe is too complicated to be left to the intellectual speculation of science alone. Professor Flew admits that science has its limitation. It cannot explain the beginning of the universe and the genesis of the diversity of life as we know it today.
I believe that there comes a point in a person’s life, whether he is a scientist or a layman, when he has to stand back, drop all his tools of skepticism, and acknowledge that the wonders all around him is a result of deliberate and purposeful design and not a lucky throw of the cosmic dice.
At the end of his search for the divine, Professor Flew sums up his conviction by writing, “I am entirely open to learning more about the divine…I am open to omnipotence.”
Imagine an octogenarian, at almost the end of his life, and after spending decades arguing against the existence of God, taking that all important first step to know his creator. How much more then should we, who have decades ahead of us, treasure the time we now have to know God and to know the depth of his love for us. Indeed, in this life, it is never too late to come back full circle to God and to admit that we have lived amiss without Him. Are we fully opened to omnipotence?
Everything we do in this life only makes complete sense when we measure all our thoughts, actions and contributions against the benchmark of eternity. Our hope as Christians should therefore be hinged on this promise, “Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me…I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:1-3)
The trouble with some of us is that we suffer from what I call “eternity-myopia”. This condition plagues our spiritual sight and prevents us from looking beyond the empty tomb. This condition also causes us to grieve over material losses more in this world because we are blinded to the life beyond. We therefore need to go for sight correction. God needs to perform a spiritual lasik on us so that we will always keep eternity within our spiritual sight. A chaplain’s witty remarks is in order here, “we think that we are in the land of the living going to the land of the dying when in reality we are in the land of the dying headed for the land of the living.”
What counts for eternity is how we live our lives now. While we are still alive, we can make a difference to our own life and the life of others. The difference need not be large; it can be small but incremental and progressive. I do not want to spend the rest of this short letter telling you how to live a Christian life since what needs to be said has already been said in the Bible. The change I am advocating is not a change of conduct as a start; it is a change of the heart. Don’t rush to become a “good Christian” without giving the matter much thought and prayer. I do not believe in a grand start leading to a miserable end.
What distinguishes a true Christian from a counterfeit one is a convicted heart. And true conviction comes with discipline and ceaseless focus. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime. Sometimes, it takes an encounter. But most surely, true conviction comes with total surrender to God. And this is no easy task since we still want our way as much as we want full control of all things while paying lip service to biblical principles. The phrase “let go and let God be God” is still very hard to do for some of us.
But the beauty of total surrender is not that God requires us to cease all desires for material things and thereby becoming owner of nothing; it merely requires us to stop wanting a stake in the outcome of life’s events. It merely requires us to stop wanting to control how things turn out. It merely requires us to trust and hope that all things, however the outcome, is in good hands and God will one day give an account of them.
We must always bear in our spirit that we are living in three different worlds. The Bible puts it beyond doubt that the world around us is the first world. Then, running concurrently, is the world within us - our spirit being, the temple of God. The last world is the world to come, our heavenly rest. Our hope and focus should always be on the world to come. We do this by cultivating the world within us, feeding our spirit, tending to its needs and allowing it to hold captive our fleshly desires.
When our focus is on the world to come and our world within is at peace, we are then ready to face the world around us. Until then, our heart is far from being convicted by God’s promises.
It is only when our priority is scrambled, when we let the things of this world to harass us, to keep us busy, to shake our faith and focus that we suffer unceasing unrest and remain in a state of rebellion and discontent.
Let the comforting words of the author of the book, Eternity, Joseph M. Stowell take us home, “Life is most disappointing, most despairing, when it is lived as though this world is all we have. Questions have few answers, and cries become all-consuming. Thankfully, this is not the only world. Christ connects us to the eternal world to come and provides for us an eternally redeemed world within. This present world makes sense only when we live here in the light of these other worlds.As Paul said, “if we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are all men most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:19)
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