Ok, I am sitting at the slowest computer ever, and entered this cafe already irritable. Good spot to be, huh?
As I type, I have so many random things to cover and I have to pee, so hold on.
First I want to thank my brother in law Michael Alexanian for giving that laptop to us, because that is now the only computer our team is using, I believe. I also want to thank my father in law, Don Anderson, for his help in our techno stuff, and my other brother in law Steve Anderson, for the palm. Linnea is plugging away on that and has become really adept at solitaire. we use the palm alot. I just figured it would be a pain to use all this tech stuff, but it has come in really handy.
I have so many different things I want to talk about, but time is passing and we head to the island of Ometepe tomorrow morning. We have church in a couple of hours, Shauna is speaking, I spoke yesterday, and am planning on getting that message up here eventually. I am also planning on getting last weeks message up here.
This week we spent a lot of time working on physical jobs around the quinta, and many hours on team relationship stuff. I usually hate to paint, but it sure beats all this emotional and how we communicate and being aware of the terms we use. So much of my own angers and pride and selfishness and laziness is so evident. So often I want to just go grab a beer instead of dealing with these things. But one thing that is really on my mind is eternity.
All of our lives and everything in our lives will be judged by fire. We will spend the rest of eternity with the justice from this judgement. I have just been realizing what really matters in life, how often my motivations are a little weird. How unloving I can be, that this matters.
Glenn let me borrow a book by John Bevere, which I suggest for everyone, called Driven by Eternity. This has a lot of allegory and some descriptions of heaven. We also watched a movie called The Lazarus Phenomenon, which told two stories of near death experiences. I would suggest watching that movie also. We watched it in Guyana once, but this time was much more impactful. Both that book and this movie have really challenged some of my views.
One of these is can a person lose their salvation? In both the movie and this book people who believed in Jesus still went to hell. Both the movie and the book really challenge me to pay more attention to how I live and speak and act and think.
Both of these also vividly describe heaven and hell, and these descriptions make hell even more miserable than I can imagine and heaven even better than I can imagine. If we as christians only had a grasp on what eternity means and what heaven and hell are like. For some reason I feel like we almost never talk about this, because we are afraid of scaring or offending someone. Or maybe sounding a little off in the head. What if this is real, if eternity in heaven or hell is real, and we believe it, how can we spend time dwelling on much else?
Our views of heaven as clouds and people with wings are complete fallacies. Heaven is described as a physical place, where people live and have responsibilities. Our responsibilities in heaven are assigned according to our lives on earth.
Heaven is described as having streets of pure gold. Not the gold we understand, but so pure it is described as being like glass. Would you wear pavement around your finger? We value gold so much down here, but in heaven it is used to pave the streets! Wrap your head around that! What we value here, precious stones and gems are used as building materials in heaven. Walls are made of diamonds and emeralds, gates are made out of pearl. N0t pearls, but a gate is made out of one pearl. What would that look like? And colors we can never imagine, will we be able to see ultraviolet and infrared? Maybe we will see sound, like some acid trip. One of the descriptions I have read and heard were stones and flowers and grass that sing praises to God.
And our bodies in heaven, what will it be like to have a body like the resurrected Jesus? We can eat and drink and feel and fly and go through walls. How bout them apples? One of the stories the boy who had the near death experience met his relatives in heaven and was shown the mansions waiting for his family on earth. How cool is that? Then the boy was told by Jesus that he had to return because his father on earth called him back, and his father has that spiritual authority, again, try to wrap your head around that! I can´t. But do you have anything that matters more in life than putting yourself to this understanding?
The other part we almost never discuss is storing our treasures in heaven. If Jesus talked about this and Paul talked about it, why don´t we? If we understood how we live after salvation determines our eternal lives in heaven, wouldn´t this be our motivation or our driving force? If we understood eternity, would every breath we take on earth be used for more noble purposes?
As I carried these stones in one of our projects, each stone weighed about 60 Kg, or over 120 pounds. I just lumped back and forth, carrying over 100 of them, until I totally exfoliated (as Linnea described it) my back and my hands. As I type, I feel that soreness in my knuckles, my elbows and shoulders. My back aches. Isn´t this loving the Lord with all my strength? My paycheck was the same whether I carried one stone or 100 stones, here on earth, so what was my motivation? It was the belief that at that moment that is how I take up the cross. Just as at this moment I type and try to love the Lord with all I have, even as I rebuke anger and irritation and pride and laziness and selfishness…lust.
My motivation was, each stone I carried I imagined adding one more brick or reward to my life in eternity. As I painted, I imagined paint being put on the fence in my backyard in heaven. This fence which contained all the dogs that I have had in life. I am not sure about the theology behind this, do all dogs go to heaven? What about rewards? Spending yesterday preparing a message, and then standing in front of the crowd and talking about this foolishness of salvation and eternity and eternal rewards, do we earn rewards for speaking about rewards?
And eternal damnation. Every little bit of the proud american in me, the liberal education, cringes and scoffs as I think about hell. The God I have made in my image would never throw anyone into this Lake of Fire, would he? What about mercy and grace? What about losing our salvation if we are not obedient to God? Did God really intend a certain life for each of us that we need to discover and glorify him? What if we enjoy our christianity but don´t actually obey God? What if we are called to missions and just sit on our butts? It seems to me that this life of disobedience will be burned as wood and straw in the judgement. What if my motivation for being on the world race was not to truly glorify God, but to ease my own conscience? What if I don´t truly want to please God, but want God to be pleased with me? What if I am still trying to earn God´s love? What if I just don´t want God to be mad at me?
I truly believe I am right where God wants me, and it is not easy. Every day I am further refined. Every day I see the need for further refinement. But if there is such a thing as eternity, which I do believe, even if I don´t understand it, I feel that this is worth it. I also hope everyone who reads this spends just a few minutes pondering eternity. Ponder how you live in the light of eternity. Start thinking about the excuses you are saving for your judgement. A God who can see into your deepest secrets and motives and thoughts is going to be difficult to con, even if on earth we have done a good job of conning ourselves.
OK, that´s enough, read the book and watch the movie, as Jesus return rapidly approaches.
