I used to worry about a lot of things:
My career
My health
My finances
And many more
In fact, I used to keep a written list of things to worry about. It was arranged in order of priority. It ran into 4 or 5 typewritten pages. When I had some free time, I would pull out the list and start worrying my way down page one. Usually, I would lose interest before page two.
But, over the years, my “worry list” has shriveled up. Part of this is due to my age. But, most of the shrinkage in my “worry list” is due to my growing understanding of the length and breadth of my life.
For much of my 73 years, my understanding of my life was that I had about 80 years to work with. I had about 80 years to get everything done. When I was 20, this was comforting. I had so much time at my disposal that I could throw away a year or two……even a decade or two…….and never miss it. And I did just that as I built my career. But, as I have grown older, the runway ahead of me began to shrink. Death, which was pretty much a theoretical concept when I was young, has become much more real and present. This old understanding of death as the end of my life led to a slowly growing despair. With each passing day, I was one day closer to old age, decrepitude, and, ultimately, the dead black nothing of death.
When I became a functioning Christian, I discovered a new understanding of death…….my death. Instead of the end of my life……the end of me; instead of being a stone wall that I was doomed to crash into at 80 miles an hour, death became something entirely different. Christianity teaches that death is not the end of life. Rather, death is a transition from one format of life into an entirely different format…….a format that is so radically different that we cannot wrap our brains around it. When we die, we change from a time limited physical existence to a new existence, where time imposes no limits. From a practical perspective, time ceases to exist. This eternal, spiritual world is centered around our creator. It is built on one concept……love. This is the “real” world…….because this is the world where we will exist forever. The irony here is that the spiritual world is far more real than our brief temporal/physical world. Eternal life is God’s promise, whether you are a Christian or not.
With that promise in mind, the nature of my “worry list” changed. Suddenly, just about all 5 pages of my “worry list” evaporated. It turns out that almost every worry on my list will go away when I die. The crushing weight of 5 pages of worry will simply disappear. My worries will go away because they are almost all confined to the temporal/physical world that I operate in today……..and for a few more years. They simply will not be relevant in the spiritual world. The great irony here is that my 5 pages of worries will be resolved……..fixed…….by my death.
So……..what is left? As a Christian……..what do I worry about today?
Three things:
I worry about my friend, a Buddhist.
I worry about a young man……..a committed atheist/secular humanist.
I worry about a young woman who defines Christianity as a “cult” and who is dabbling in the occult…..which apparently is not a “cult”.
I love these people. And I worry about them. I worry because God promises them eternity as well…….an eternity devoid of love and joy.
It will just be a different eternity from the eternity God offers me.
‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.
’Jesus describing two different eternities, Luke 16: 25-26, ESV