What has God been teaching me these past 9 months you may ask…well I have begun to realize that the Lord is answering one of my very first prayers of this trip. I asked that upon this journey I would learn to see the world through God’s perspective. Instead of a holistic view of several cultures who all love the same God, which I had anticipated, His perspective is one eternal. God sees the world as a space of time. We aren’t just eternal beings once we die, we are eternal now, who will all go through the experience of death and see the other side. Remembering this completely changes your mindset.
How differently would you live your life if you saw death as just another experience? How differently would you make decisions, would your plans for the future change, the way you love? When you stop searching for happiness and see that this time on earth is a special time for you to be used by God and all that that includes, what would you do differently? What would capture your focus? How would your view of time change and its meaning change?
I’ll tell you what this new perspective has done for me. It made me slow down, find joy in the moment, be patient and trust what the Lord has for me. But at the same time it has given me an urgency, to see my time in this space as a fraction of my life if I am an eternal being. It motivates me to ask what the Lord has for me each day so I don’t miss out on His plan here..now… It helps the worries of the world that usually boggle you down such as: what career will I choose, how big of a house will I buy, what outfit should I wear, or am I happy… it helps them lose meaning and therefore lose power over constraining your time here. Your focus changes because your meaning of life has changed. And this is the only part of your life where time matters.
As Ann Voskamp says it, “Life is a dessert—too brief to hurry” so ask yourself what truly matters and get going on living for those things. For God’s things, because when you look at the picture of life now and life in heaven as whole, you want your desires to be God’s desires, you want your plans to be God’s plans, and you want your moments to be God’s moments.
C.S. Lewis said, “If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.” Jesus came down and humbled Himself as a man and suffered the worst, “Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted” (Heb 12:3). “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons” (Heb 12:7). This time on earth is a precious time for the Lord to open our eyes to Him and teach His mysteries. Our time of true happiness is what is promised to come in heaven; true fulfillment.
Like a caterpillar and butterfly. Normally we view this analogy of maturing and growing into yourself but it’s viewing your time on earth as a caterpillar, the time in the cocoon as the experience of death, and then to emerge as the fully redeemed beauty as God intended you to be.
So keep your eyes on the things above (Col 3:1) and store up treasures in heaven that wont rust and die away as will the treasures you leave on earth (Mat 6:33). Live assured that one day you will be fully redeemed, however live as this is who you are now. Be joyful because He who promised is faithful (Heb10:23). Remember that your life was given to you by God and you gave it back to him in faith of future salvation to do His will now. So let Him be a part of your every day, every moment so you don’t miss out on the purest of life that the Lord not only wants for you but has for you.
