Forever

As I watched an Amy Winehouse video this morning, I couldn't help thinking of how difficult it is for the truly gifted to make it through this life. There is a seemingly endless list of famous people who have drunk, drugged or eaten themselves to an early grave and an equally impressive group who have ended things by their own hand. Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, River Phoenix, Sid Vicious, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Poe, Dennis Wilson, Kerouac, John Candy, Hunter Thompson, Ledger, Chris Farley, Belushi and Marilyn Monroe all died hard and young.

Someone once told me that even if Heaven was a lie, the Christian life was the best life to lead anyway. Sheer and utter garbage. The Apostle Paul said if Jesus hadn't risen from the dead, Christians were the most foolish people in the world, and they should embrace eating, drinking and being merry with everyone else. I personally would be smoking lots of dope, chasing skirts and committing larceny (for amusement and profit).

Following Christ is equal measure playing out this hand and playing out different cards in eternity with God, in one of the 8 other dimensions super collider scientists have isolated.

There is only so much intrinsic joy in selling your possessions and giving your money to the poor; only so much cheerful interest in being burned alive; only so much peaceful anticipation of being disemboweled like William Wallace; only so much steely resolve to endure torture behind the iron or bamboo curtains.

Following Jesus includes eternal life in a spiritual place where time blurs into a mysterious, personal experience with God. Heaven is forever without boredom or endless
repetition. I don't understand all of it, but I don't get where the matter given life by the "big bang" came from either.

Heaven is irrelevant to many in our culture. We are smarter; we live longer; we are not persecuted. Before my father, not a Christian, died - three years ago at 88 - he often commented on how ready he was to die. He was tired and wearing out. He was ready to sleep. Older people are less interested in converting to a religion that promises activity after death than a thirty year old, cut down by the bubonic plague in his prime. We don't often huddle in the corner of a jail cell whimpering to God for help or have the occasion to cry out from the chopping block, waiting for the axe to fall. Westerners die in our beds, doped to the gills with pain reducing agents, easing us out through the last stages of metastasized cancer. We are numbed into eternity - or into nothing.

As important as Jesus' teachings are, the lynch pin of his life was the resurrection. This validated His miracles, the authority of His words, His promises about the future, His assurances about eternal life and His warnings regarding a future without His involvement in an individual's life.

Forever is a long time, with or without Him.