When we kept our grandsons last
spring, twenty-month-old Judah usually climbed into my lap every evening as we
sat at the table for a final cup of coffee. It took me a minute the first
time his little hand reached out in the air, but finally I realized he was
trying to catch the steam wafting over my mug, and was completely mystified
when it disappeared between his chubby little fingers.
A lot of
people spend their lives trying to catch the steam, vapors that seem solid but
disintegrate in their grasping hands. They do it in all sorts of ways,
and all of them are useless.
Do they
really think they can stop time? Over 11,000,000 surgical and nonsurgical
cosmetic procedures were performed in this country in 2013, and we aren’t
talking medically necessary procedures. The top five were liposuctions,
breast augmentations, eyelid surgeries, tummy tucks, and nose surgeries.*
Then there
are the folks chasing wealth and security. Didn’t the recent Great
Recession, as it is now called, teach them anything? Others are striving
to make a name for themselves. These are usually the same folks who tell
Christians how pathetic we are to believe that some Higher Power would ever
notice we even exist on this puny blue dot in the universe. Yet there
they all go looking for fame, fortune, notoriety, beauty, or even their version
of eternal life. All of it is nothing more than a dream. It will
disappear, if not in a natural disaster or an economic meltdown, then the day
they die—and they will die no matter how hard they try not to. They are
the ones grasping at dreams which are only a vapor that disappears in a flash.
Our dream
isn’t a dream at all. It is a hope, which in the Biblical sense means it
is all but realized. Sin and death have been conquered by a force we can
only try to comprehend, by a love we can never repay, and by a will we can but
do our best to imitate. Yet there it is, not a wisp of white floating
over a warm porcelain mug, but a solid foundation upon which we base our faith.
Heb 6:19 calls it “an anchor.” Have you ever seen a real anchor? If
there is anything the opposite of a wisp of steam, that’s it—solid and strong,
able to hold us steady in the worst winds of life. Tell me how a pert
nose and a full bank account can do that!
The world
thinks it knows what is real while we sit like a toddler grasping at
steam. When eternity comes, they will finally see that they are
wrong. Spiritual things are the only things that last, the only real
things at all.
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner
self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is
preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look
not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the
things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal,
2 Cor 4:6-8.
*Information from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery
Dene Ward
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