For a great many of us, the year might as well begin in September. The summer’s over, kids and teachers go back to school, young people head off to college. Becky and I saw the first of our four little one’s leave home (though none of them are little anymore).
There’s often a sweet sadness that accompanies these seasons of change. Sweet because it is often only in such seasons of change that we realize just how much we love one another, and sad because we are parting. There’s an old saying, “You don’t know what you got till its gone,” and that unfortunately is often the case. We become aware of those things that are most important to us at precisely the moment when we can no longer do anything about it. When the proverbial wisdom of life comes, it’s a day late and a dollar short.
Christians struggle with this too. We sometimes think being a Christian means we are somehow exempt from all the ordinary feelings and missteps that accompany mortal life, but this is a mistake. It is of course true that a disciplined life based on godly principles can save us from trodding some of the more well-worn paths of human stupidity, but even the most godly life is never free from sorrow or weakness. Jesus alone was perfect among all the sons of men, and yet even he shed tears (John 11:35), even he was anxious unto death (Mark 14:34). True, there is a peace and a joy that permeates every genuinely Christian existence—and anyone who doesn’t haven’t it isn’t really a Christian—but it is a peace won through trial, and it is a joy on the other side of sorrow.
For it is in the stripping away of our mortal attachments that we come to learn dependence on the Immortal One
Our advantage as Christians is not that we stand above ordinary human trials, but that, by faith, we are able to access grace in time of need. There will be sad goodbyes, but sad goodbyes are not the end—not for the person of faith. Indeed, they reveal to us what we so often forget, that the people who we loved were never really ours to keep in the first place. They were a gift from the Lord, who both gives and takes away, but in so doing has been preparing us every step of the way for our entrance into eternity. For it is in the stripping away of our mortal attachments that we come to learn dependence on the Immortal One, of whom David said, “He is the Rock.” But this stripping away is not, as some of the ancient Greeks thought, a preparation for mere disembodied existence, for if the Bible teaches us anything, it teaches us that the Creator God only ever destroys in order to build back up again, to give back double all that was lost. This is the great paradox of faith: that in giving things up we receive them back, transfigured from what they were before. Only when by God’s grace we have the faith to believe that can we truly say with the Apostle: To live is Christ, to die is gain (Philippians 1:21).
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