What Happens When God Is Out of Sight

Isaiah 64:1-9
Advent 1
11/29/20

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,
you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet, O LORD, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O LORD, and do not remember iniquity forever.
Now consider, we are all your people.

On our way to Christmas, we will have four conversations with the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is one of the great truth-tellers in the scriptures. He declares what it obvious to those who haven’t been paying attention. He speaks through the despair to those who have all but given up hope. And in the portion of his long sermon that we hear today, the prophet shakes his fist at heaven.

God is nowhere to be seen. The absence has become the norm. Isaiah’s people go about their business as if God doesn’t matter, as if God isn’t watching, as if God is not the least bit concerned about how they live or what they do. By all appearances, they don’t really care about God. And they live with a good deal of pain in the process.

That comes as no surprise. Like so many contemporary stories, God isn’t part of the scene. Some people may claim that God is the screenwriter of every human story. Well, even if that is the case, the Divine Author is offstage. In God’s absence, people get themselves into all kinds of sloppy messes.

This is how the prophet Isaiah would diagnose our human situation. In the poem we heard today, he cries out toward the sky. He wants to know where God is hiding. Just a few minutes before, he was praising God’s mercy. “It’s been nothing but steadfast love for centuries,” he sings. “God has been present, and his presence saved us.” 

But then his tone changes suddenly – maybe he clicked on the television remote or glanced at the headlines. Maybe he is wheezing from a cough he cannot shake. So Isaiah says, “Where is the One who brought them up out of the sea? Where is the One who put his Holy Spirit within them? If only You would rip open the heavens and come down!” 

It’s a striking poem to begin the season of Advent. We are waiting for God – that is the primary theme of the season. We wait for a God who spends centuries getting his work accomplished. Nothing in God’s time ever happens quickly or on our schedule. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to happen, but it serves as a reminder that we are not in charge. In the grand scheme of things, we are not in charge of very much at all. I have yet to meet a person who can spin a planet at the correct speed, invent gravity, or cause the grass to grow. To wait for God is to honor God, and to regard what God alone can do.

The problem is, the longer we wait, the more creative we become. We scan the horizon, don’t catch so much as a glimpse of the Lord Almighty, and then the wheels start turning. Here is how Isaiah puts it in the poem for today. He points a bony finger at God and declares, “Because you hid yourself, we transgressed.” It is that simple, and that profound. “Because you hid yourself, we transgressed.”

This shared trait of ours began rather early. God created a Garden and put two people in the middle of it. God said everything in the Garden is yours, except from that tree over there. Then God went off to manage the planet Saturn and polish up the rings. Just as soon as he was out of sight, those two human children said, “Let’s go check out the tree.”

Centuries later, Isaiah knows it hasn’t gotten any better. The human race has not improved in any way. Oh, we have our fancy toys and our wonderful new medications. We have our nice homes and closets full of clothes – there were none of these things in the Garden. But that doesn’t mean that we have progressed or advanced in the things that matter. God was out of sight, and we transgressed.

“Lord, if only you had been here,” says the prophet.

Isaiah seems to believe we would be better behaved if we knew the Lord was present. Do you think that’s true? If God stood over my right shoulder, would I make better decisions? Be a better steward of my words? Eat a few less slices of pumpkin pie? Would I live in the joy and peace that he invites for us all?

Yesterday, I realized this may be the first year in recent memory when we didn’t hear about some horrific accident on Black Friday. You know the kind I mean: a line forms outside of the MegaMart SuperStore before the turkey is cold. Normally same people camp out on a frosty Thursday night so they can bust down the doors and be one of the fifty lucky shoppers to get that $200 flat screen TV. Anybody in their way may get trampled.

We didn’t hear any stories like that. Not yet. In a pandemic year, only the brave and the foolish are pushing their way into the shopping malls. Others want nothing to do with it.   

“It just doesn’t seem like Christmas,” somebody said outside of Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan. She was complaining that nobody was sitting on Santa’s lap inside the store. Instead, Macy’s has reimagined the visits by setting up a website where kids can talk online to the jolly old elf,

 Meanwhile, at the Bass Pro Shop, purveyor of all things masculine, they have put Santa behind an acrylic shield. Kids can still get their pictures taken with him as long as they stay in front of the plexiglass. Extra elves have been employed as Santa’s Sanitation Squad, squirt bottles of Windex ready at hand.[1]

Believe it or not, some freedom fighters are protesting the changes. One of them said “I have a constitutional right to get the corona virus if I want to.”  Oy vey – if only the Lord would come down here. If only we were in the complete unveiled presence of God, maybe people it would never have occurred to anybody to do such a thing.

When God is out of the picture, foolishness happens. Violence happens. When God steps away to tend to other matters, the children he was babysitting begin to act up. When God steps back to allow people some freedom to work out their differences, sometimes - much of the time - they make tough situations even worse.

Biblically speaking, Isaiah offers up a lament. About half of the Bible’s prayers fall into this category. The other half of those prayers celebrate God’s presence – they express awe, they give thanks, they raise the rafters with hallelujahs. But a prayer like the one we hear today takes note of God’s absence. And prayers like these are valid, too. They recognize that we have moved a long way from the Garden of Eden. Nothing short of the presence of God will ever change us or our situations.

If we are honest, you and I, we have plenty to lament about. This is a stressful season. It is a dangerous time of the year. We find ourselves surrounded by so much artificial light, so much manufactured joy, that we are tempted to neglect our own spirits. We worry about getting up the lights, even if we’re not feeling very sparkly. In a normal year, we fret about giving the right number of gifts. And this year, with a pandemic turning everything upside down, we know that nothing less than God can give us consolation.

"Lord, if only you would rip open the heavens and come down!" prays Isaiah.

It's interesting that when the Gospel of Mark tells the story of Jesus, he uses the same exact language. It's there in the first chapter, as we will hear next month. On the day Jesus was baptized, the heavens were ripped open - the Greek verb is schizomai - as in schizophrenic, which is a divided person, or schism, which is a divided organism. The heavens were ripped open from the other side, Mark says, and then . . . a dove came down. Not an eagle. Not a hawk. Not a vulture. But a dove -- in the thick of that violent tear in the seam of the sky, a bird of peace and gentleness descended.

It is a glimpse how God will visit us in the ministry of Jesus. Never domineering, yet determined. Never completely absent, but frequently out of sight. From time to time, either to test us or to invite us into reverence, God hides. And God watches to see how we live as we wait. How will we treat one another? How will we pray? Will we live and pray as if we expect God to come?

There’s a remarkable church leader from Africa named Devison Banda. We’ve never met, but friends have told me about him. He was born in village in Zambia. His family was poor, but somehow by the grace of God, somebody sent him to a boy’s school. He went on to receive a divinity degree, and then a doctorate in New Testament. After that, he became the president of the seminary that trained him, the Justo Mwale Theological College in the capital city of Lusaka.

When Devison began working as a pastor, he and his family were dirt poor, and so was their church. In their first week, they had a little food, and a little money. Both ran out. All there was to eat was something called “mealy meal,” a corn meal from which they make something analogous to southern grits. They had mealy-meal, and that was it.

One morning, at the beginning of the day, as the family sat for prayer, Devison says he prayed, “Lord, you passed us by yesterday; but in your providence don’t pass us by again today, yet in all things may your name be praised.” The day went on, and no food came. So at prayer the next morning, he prayed, “Lord, you passed us by again, but surely you stopped by someone else’s house; but in your providence don’t pass us by again today, yet in all things may your name be praised.” Once again, that day, no food arrived. And then on the third day, food came.

It’s that prayer that attaches itself to my soul, and which I pass along for you. It is a lament, in its own way – poignant, and ultimately expectant. “You passed us by again today, don’t pass by us again; yet in all things may your name be praised.”

On the first day of Advent, that is our prayer. And we take a cue from Isaiah and pray it again. Maybe this time God will answer. Maybe this time we will be paying attention.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] See, for instance, https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2020/11/25/mall-santa-photos-coronavirus/

Love or Perish

Matthew 25:31-46
Christ the King
November 22, 2020

William G. Carter

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ 

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

In the opening weeks of the Second World War, the poet W.H. Auden created a new poem. He titled it “September 1, 1939,” after the day that Germany initiated the war by invading Poland. The poem is long enough that I’m not going to read the whole. But I will give you the next to last stanza.

Auden reflected on how wars begin. “Waves of anger and fear / circulate over the bright / and darkened lands of the earth, obsessing our private lives.” He had a grim view of arrogant politicians. He thought little of the inattentive folk who ignored what is going on in their own country, and ignorant of the games other countries were playing. And then there is this stanza. Listen:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

 At the heart of our human experience, this is the moral choice: to love one another or die. To care for one another or perish. There’s no question why many pulled that poem off the shelf after the tragedies of 9-11. With another wave of Covid-19 breaking out among us, Auden’s poem is both poignant and true. And it resonates with the familiar text we have heard from Matthew 25.

Jesus lays out this vision of how God will judge the earth. It comes at the end of a series of parables, so some regard it as a parable, a veiled story about the dominion of God. But it is more of a vision, a revelation of what it really going on and what is ultimately true.

I know we have heard it several times, so let me call attention to a few details.

 First, there is a clear difference in people. These are not red, blue, and purple in-between. No, they are split into two groups. No confusion about it. No blurring of the lines. No grading on the curve. We are placed either here or there – and we don’t get to choose. We are sorted by the King on his throne. Not just any king, but The King who sits on The Throne.

Now, anybody who has been listening to Matthew’s Gospel knows this is coming. Way back in chapter 13, he reports Jesus as declaring the kingdom of God is like a net that catches every kind of fish. There are goldfish and guppies, stingrays and sharks, and every conceivable type of fish. And when the net is full, says Jesus, it is pulled ashore and all the fish are sorted. (13:47-50). It is a glimpse of what is coming at the end of the age: sheep on the right, goats on the left, and nobody in the middle.

Second, the basis of the sorting is a single determining issue. Here it is: did you care for others in their time of need? Yes or no. There’s no room for a “maybe.” No room for an apology. No room for good intentions.

Again, this will be no surprise for anybody who has been working through Matthew’s lessons in discipleship. This is the book where Jesus blesses the meek of the earth. And he says, “If you give a cup of cold drinking water to the little ones (that is, those with the greatest needs), you will keep your reward.” (10:42). Since this is one of the later books in the New Testament, perhaps written 50 years after the resurrection, it sounds like old Brother Matthew is confronting a lazy congregation. They have theology in their heads but no love in their hearts.

And this is the very last teaching that Jesus offers before he dies. Matthew puts it at the end to stress its importance, as if to say, “If you have forgotten everything else, don’t forget this.” It is the final exam for the course of life. The single question: did you care for others? Yes or no.

And the third detail, perhaps the most unusual, is that Jesus is hidden among the needy. The One who will judge us is standing in the bread line, hoping for a meal. The One who sits upon the governing throne at the center of the universe is standing in the check out line at the Dollar Store, wondering if he has enough pocket change to buy a can of pork and beans.

Nobody will recognize him. Not those on the right, not those on the left. It’s just as well. He was not looking for preferential treatment. Listen to the Final Vision of Matthew 25. Nobody could say, “If I knew you were here, I would have paid more attention.” Nobody is permitted to push back and say, “If only I realized it was you, I would have shown you some care.” Oh no.

Both sheep and goats share the same question, “Lord, when did we see you?” Both get the same answer: “You didn’t.”  It doesn’t matter if anybody recognizes Jesus or not. His hidden presence exposes the truth about out: either we care, or we don’t. Either we love or we perish.

So if that is the single question on the final exam, our challenge is to prepare for it. And it will take some preparation. You know as well as I that some folks are easy to love and other folks are a lot more challenging. Some people will accept help and accept it graciously. Others are conditioned to say, “No thanks; I can do it myself; I will be OK.”

About a dozen years ago, we sent a few teams to clean up after Hurricane Katrina. We wanted to help, and not sit it out on dry land, and say, “Isn’t it too bad what happened to those poor people?” So we went.

One day, they sent a few of us over to Dina Drive, a suburban cul-de-sac. We started knocking on doors to assess if there was something we could do. One warm-hearted couple invited me in, offered me cold drink, and told me how the winds blew the roof off their house. They were OK, but the roof was gone. Fortunately, they had an emergency savings account. When a roofing contractor stopped by, they asked him to do the work, emptied out their account to give him a deposit, and he never came back. That was two months ago. The blue tarp was still on the top of their house. What could I say or do to improve that situation? I listened, they wept, we prayed.

Across the street was a single father named Jack. He worked as an engineer on an offshore oil rig. He and 12-year-old Jack Jr. lived in a FEMA trailer parked in front of what was left of his house. He wanted nothing to do with our work crew. “No way,” he said. “No offense,” he said, “but a group like yours comes down here, put up the dry wall and doesn’t keep it straight. The next youth group comes to paint it and does a lousy job. Both groups leave, most of them feeling better about themselves, and I tear out their work to do it right myself.” All I could do it listen. Let him unload for a few minutes. Let him know there was a fellow human being who heard his story.

It's hard work to care for other people, especially if you can’t fix their situations. Especially if there is little we can do to take away their suffering.

Early on in my ministry, in my ceaseless desire for people to like me, I would make all kinds of promises. Let me get you some groceries. Do you need some money? How about if I call you once a day? Is there something I can do? So on and so forth. You can guess how these promises turned out, especially if you have ever made them to somebody that you cared about. And let me offer a blanket apology to all the people I’ve let down. None of us can fix all the hurts and troubles of another person.

But here is what we can do: we can join them in their humanity. We can be present, completely present. We can be still in our own anxiety and listen. If we speak, we can offer open-ended questions, such as “How are you today?” and “What does it feel like to go through what you’re going?” Hush and let them tell us. Don’t worry about being an expert or a fix-it man. Settle in and be a human being.

I’ve taken courses and workshops in counseling. I’ve spent time with counselors myself. Yet the best training I’ve ever received was from a professor in a class that had nothing to do with counseling. We were all new at this caregiving stuff, and a classmate asked, “What do we do when somebody calls to tell us about a tragedy – a death or an accident or something like that?” He looked over his spectacles and simply said, “You go.” But what if you don’t know what to say? And he replied, “You aren’t there to speak; you are there to be there.” It was subtle but brilliant advice.

The alternative is to not go. To hold back. To stick to yourself. To choose isolation. To risk falling into indifference. To let your heart grow cold and surrounded by thorns.

Now, these are the days of Covid-19. The virus is real. It’s not a joke. So we must find ways to “go” without physically going. It might take a bit of imagination. Maybe it’s a phone call. Or an email. Or reaching into that desk drawer full of greeting cards that you haven’t sent in a while. Or – and imagine this – handwriting a personal letter to someone. Imagine what that would mean! When was the last time you got a handwritten letter? Just imagine what that would mean to somebody else.

One of the truths about caring for another is that it is reciprocal. True caring is never from a position of power. It works best side by side. Not by towering over someone, but by pulling up alongside. No need to fix something, especially something not easily fixed. But you can choose to be present, even from miles away.  

The other truth about caring is that it becomes the means by which the Risen Christ reaches all of us. Two things we know presently about Jesus: He is alive, and he is hidden. As we reach sideways to one another, the Mystery is that he reaches through us. Sometimes we might even catch a glimpse of him at work.

This takes some practice, of course. All important things take practice. But one thing I know: if we extend our love to one another, particularly those in need, when the Son of Man comes in his glory, we won’t ever ask, “Lord, when did we see you?”  We will know. Oh yes, we will know.

 

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Those Who Endure

Revelation 7:9-17
All Saints Day / November 1, 2020
Rev. Bill Carter

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

This is one of my favorite passages from the Book of Revelation. And I realize that’s a curious thing to say.

Christian people tend to extremes with this final book in the Bible. Either they love it, or they ignore it. Either they spend an inordinate amount of time mapping out the end of the World, to the exclusion to the teachings of Jesus or God’s promises to Israel. Or they dismiss the ancient book as a science fiction fantasy about dragons with seven heads and sharp teeth.

I like the Book of Revelation for a very simple reason: it tells the truth. 

It tells the truth about Jesus. He is the Risen One, with a sharp tongue that slices away falsehood. His countenance radiates perfect power. He holds all the stars in his hand. Jesus is the One who sits upon the throne, the Real Throne, the Only Throne – and to claim that authority, he looks like a Lamb who was slain but now lives. This Lamb now shepherds his people. With visionary language like this, Revelation reveals what it true about our Lord.

It tells the truth about life as we know it. Life is a struggle. It is not easy. The prophet John, who writes down the visions that become the book of Revelation, sees this as a cosmic battle between good and evil. Wherever Christ the Lamb sits on the throne, there is push-back and rebellion. Whenever the Lamb shepherds his flock and calls them to love, the equal-and-opposite reaction is for other folks to show a lot of hate. 

These days, we might know something about that. Yesterday, if it wasn’t enough for a thousand new people to die from the corona plague in our nation, a get-out-the-vote rally in North Carolina was stopped by police officers who fired pepper spray into a crowd. Political signs are popping up all over town; when they are stolen overnight, each side blames the other, shouting past one another, and obliterating common ground. 

We are living through a season of division and animosity unlike anything I have ever experienced in my adult life. Old-timers say, “You should have seen the 1960’s,” but it looks like the beginning of the 20’s are no picnic. 

In the passage we have today, the prophet John refers to the “Great Ordeal.” The Greek word that he uses is a word about “pressing together,” as in a squeezing, a compressing, an application of pressure. “I’m your brother in this ordeal,” he says in chapter one. He doesn’t give us a lot of details. We know he has fallen afoul of the Roman Emperor, and was sent to a small, barren rock of an island off the coat of western Turkey.

John felt the pressure. Rome demanded absolute allegiance, but John sees Christ the Lamb as the One who rightfully sits on the throne. The Empire pressed in to compel John’s obedience, but John will only answer to Christ who shepherds him with grace. Caesar – in this case, a Caesar named Domitian – enforces his pressure with cruelty and the threat of death, but John knows his future is secure in the God who is stronger than the grave.     

And in the stunning vision for today, John sees a multitude of saints in a cloud of glory. They are not Jews like him; they are from every nation. They speak every language. They are gathered in unity, a reversal of the legendary tragedy of the Tower of Babel. Together they break into song, offering a seven-fold praise of God:

Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving

and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!

John is telling us the truth, not only about God, not merely about life, but also the truth about getting through the ordeal. Whatever the ordeal happens to be, it does not define us. We can feel pressed by the voices all around us, but there is one Voice that we lean forward to hear. As the Barmen Confession declared in another time of pressure, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

Beyond all sight, beyond all the pressure of whatever ordeal we are currently enduring, there is a song. The saints are singing the hymns of God. It’s an amazing sound, especially for us, who cannot safely sing when there’s a deadly virus that spreads as it is expelled into the air. Beyond the crisis we are in, somebody is singing for us until we sing again.

I think of four of our saints from our flock who have gone to live with God this year. Two of them were brothers, raised among the Baptists of Peckville, both instructed in singing the Welsh hymns no matter what. Friends called them Skip and Beno. One was a gentleman, the other was a character. Both of them grew up singing and kept singing into their adult lives. They have gone before us and now stand in the full presence of God.

And two ladies are also in that choir, Lorraine, and Alma. Lorraine lived 94 years of public service. Employed by the United States Postal Service, she served on the Dalton Borough Council for 29 years. When her small congregation folded, she joined us here. She told me, “I’m a church person. This is where I belong.” Her list of the services she provided for others is a mile long.

The only list longer, I believe, is the list of Alma’s friends. She was another remarkable saint of God. Sometimes outspoken with the women, sometimes a flirt with the men, she touched a countless number of people and transformed them into friends. In Spanish, Alma means “soul,” that irrepressible, irreducible spirit within us that inhales grace and breathes out love. That’s Alma. 

Skip, Beno, Lorraine, and Alma – a quartet of those who now sing in the choir that is just beyond our hearing. We can count those four and add their number to others we have recently lost, but we cannot begin to count all those who now enjoy the full presence of God. Are they worried now? No. Are they sick any longer? No, they are completely healed. Are they concerned about the noise and the nonsense of our present ordeal? Not one bit. 

They have passed through, as all of us will one day pass through. They are experiencing the fullness of joy and the completeness of love. And nothing shall separate them from that joy and love. Not anymore. 

When you are feeling “pressed,” try to see it from the perspective of your future. Every ordeal is temporary. Measured against eternity, it will not last very long. That’s not to ignore how painful it might feel, but it is to acknowledge what lies ahead of us – and the truth of what already surrounds us.

The day is coming when “they will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”  

This is the future for us to claim. It is the very real present for those we have offered back to God. They live eternally with Christ while we keep living here and now. 

And once in a while, the gap between “now” and “then” collapses. It can feel like heaven is right here, and earth is completely connected to it. This is the work of the Lamb who is our shepherd. He gathers us in an enormous flock. He guards us from the forces of destruction. Ultimately, he breaks down the walls that separate earth from heaven. 

So even if life is hard, the hard parts are not permanent. What is permanent is life. What keeps going is the life of eternity; our trust in God, life begins here and now and goes on then. 

Blessed are those who endure in this truth.    

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.