Seeing the End

 

Recently on Facebook I reconnected with an old friend. As I started to browse her posts and catch up, I was struck by something quite unexpected ... cancer.

From my perspective, this story began today, and the "today" was much brighter than when this all began. The recent posts were filled with phrases like "caught early" and "cancer free". It took me a while to get back to when this all started, and the farther back I got, the more clouded, uncertain, and shocking the story became; until I finally reached the initial frightening post of "I have cancer."

What I knew today, made a great difference on what I read about the past.

While for any of us, tomorrow (even the rest of today) is not promised; there is much of her story (and ours) that lay ahead. Ahead in the unknown ... a world I don't often like to think about. As someone who battles anxiety, the word "unknown" is not a friend. Yet there is a Friend who does know, and while from my perspective, the story is not written, for Him it is.

So many of us (myself included) are tempted to hold on to the temporal ... this small slice of eternity we experience here on this earth. It is no wonder the unknown, and the trials (that Christ said we would experience) often temp us to fix our gaze on them ...

Yet there is another end, an end that I put hope into (not a wish, like wishing I can balance the budget another month), but a solid hope from a promise keeping God - one that any one reading this can have if they turn to Christ, submit, and repent.

May we not come to Christ to get an "abundant life" ... or come to Christ to be free of anxiety ... or come to Christ to "be happy"... or even come to Christ to be healed.

Indeed those things "may" happen, but that is not the promise. We come for a healing from something even more deadly, and that is sin - a disease that pays dividends not just in this life, but the life to come. 

A bill that has been paid in blood by the Son of God ...

Yet we can't just recognize that "in general" ... this is personal. God cannot be in the presence of sin, or He simply wouldn't be just (any more just than a corrupt judge who lets criminals go on the basis of feeling bad for them). So do we live "wishing" that He will forgive our sins, while we change absolutely nothing? Clinging to some religious belief of our parents? Putting the cross in our back pocket as a crumpled ticket to heaven? Or do we submit to Him as LORD, follow His teaching, living in the eternal hope that out of love and grace alone, knowing that while the wages of sin is death, that the bill has been paid in full by Jesus Christ Himself.

That's a hope I can cling to.

So while I don't know what tomorrow holds, I do know Who holds it. The tapestry weaved by His sovereign Hand is something I can only see from behind right now - to me a tangled and confusing web of threads ... but alas, that day will come, when I can see the front of it and the light of His greater plan will be revealed ... 

I may not understand my journey all the time, I may not have the answers, but I'll put my trust in the One that does.

His,
~Matthew

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. (Revelation 22:17 ESV)