When Joshua saw his death approaching, he said:
“Behold, I AM GOING THE WAY OF ALL THE EARTH” Joshua 23:14.
That puts it in perspective doesn’t it? Everything on earth dies. Every plant, animal, and person. We honor graveyards but sometimes I walk through a forest or pasture and wonder who may have died there without a marked tomb. After all, people have roamed the land for thousands and thousands of years. Some went unburied. Others were buried without markers. Others had marked graves that have been lost to history, the stick or stone markers buried in a thousand years of foliage and sediment. We honor graves we know about—but we may walk over bones unaware every day.
Ancestry is like that: we honor those we know, but we forget most. We hope to know our parents and grandparents. We may have photos of great-grandparents. But we quickly lose track as the generations recede into the murky past. As we struggle to remember our earliest parents, their number doubles with each generation. You have 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and by the 10th generation there are over a thousand, and it keeps doubling.
So many lived full and amazing lives before we arrived—and yet we are self-centered, as if our generation is the most important, most educated, most talented, most advanced, most godly—whatever it is. The self-centeredness of the living is ridiculous.
This obsession with our own time also makes death more painful. When someone we love dies, they have not left the excitement, the carnival of life on earth. They have joined the adventure of life in paradise. Their deepest joy is just beginning. Similarly, they have not left this generation and all its special, fun people, but have joined ALL GENERATIONS in heaven. We are the ones on the “boring,” broken earth. Real life is in heaven. As Joni writes, HEAVEN IS YOUR REAL HOME.
When my time comes, I am ready to GO THE WAY OF ALL THE EARTH. I am ready for my promotion to REAL LIFE and REAL ADVENTURE.
ΑΩ
Household Words: 