All good things must come to an end.
Like the holidays.
Like your favorite tv series or the perfect meal.
It’s a reality we’ve all grown to live with and expect.
And I hate it.
My mom always told me that as a child, I would cry when each and every Christmas special ended because they were never long enough. I wanted that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from the Drummer Boy getting to play for Jesus to last forever.
That same tendency has followed me all my life. I desperately try to capture moments and events and memorize their every feature so that, at least in my mind, those things can last forever.
I think there is a part of all of us that longs for that sense of eternity. A never ending. We don’t understand it fully because we’ve never experienced it. Still, we long for it.
Maybe it’s because we were made for it. Something we can’t see but ache to know.
Instead, we live on a planet reduced to limits and endings. The finite.
But we CAN experience the infinite and its infinity every single day. We just celebrated it at Christmas. Emmanuel – GOD WITH US. Jesus brought us eternity. Not just to be experienced when our life here is over, but today! We get to tap into the eternal when we have a relationship with Him. We get to see something that has no bounds, no limits, no end.
LOVE. The one thing that we’re told will last forever. When everything else has done its time and faded away, love continues. In the human realm, it make take different forms, go through different seasons. It may take a beating and be tested. But if it is truly love, it will withstand the test of time.
God’s love, even more so. In it’s vast perfection it remains constant. It shows up in a myriad of ways, unique to each of us, but it absolutely never ends. Even when it’s invisible. Even when we can’t touch or taste or smell it.
It’s an active love that is continually at work for our good. Connecting threads too small for our naked, human eyes to see. Taking into account the tiniest of details that have escaped our knowledge or attention.
God’s love works with and sometimes in spite of us. If we allow it, it can work its way into our hearts and minds so deeply, so fully that it overflows in its abundance and pours over onto others as well.
It is our glimpse into eternity. It whets our appetite for the promise of “something more” out there. Our destiny of heaven.
LOVE. Bigger than anything we can imagine. Stronger that our minds can conceive.
The perfect “un-ending” to each of our stories. The eternal reality in our temporal world. Our experience of God Himself.
The show I’ll never have to cry over being too short….
Romans 8:38 – And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow – not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.
1 Corinthians 13:8 – Love never fails.
Ephesians 3:18 – And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high and how deep His love is.
