How Souls Are Made Durable

A mid-life, birthday reflection

Today is my birthday. Now squarely in midlife, I look back and marvel at the kindness of God. I also marvel at how challenging life is sometimes.

Whether we are rich or poor, sick or healthy, joyful or sorrowful—disorientation is inescapable because the memory of Eden’s glory haunts us and the anticipation of New Jerusalem’s glory teases us. As it says in Ecclesiastes, eternity resides inescapably in our human hearts.

As I write this, I begin a new year of life while tending to an aching back and feet. I rejoice in some realities and lament over others. I grieve missed opportunities while letting hope take shape with new ones.

Life is rich, sweet, beautiful, and…

All creation groans, is subject to decay, and confirms what Camus called “the bitter taste of the mortal state.”

I am at the age where each passing year reminds me that there is a date of death as well as a date of birth. The “odds” for the latter happening are one person per every one person. It is good, then, to consider Job, who said of himself:

“Though I die, yet shall I live” (Job 14:14).

Job’s words can be ours also because Jesus Christ is “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). Our King has risen from death, therefore we too will rise. This is good to know as the world experiences the aftertaste of a pandemic that threw everything, and nearly everyone, off center. For many, the aftertaste is one of fear.

Some fear for their financial futures, others for their health. Some fear for their loved ones, others for themselves. Loss of connection, warmth, and love are among the greatest fears of all. Devices are replacing community, friendship is becoming more transactional than real, over 50% of pastors are fantasizing about leaving ministry, and younger generations are more anxious and depressed and isolated than ever. The digital experiment has been wildly successful on the one hand, and a complete bust on the other. Jonathan Haidt offers the following:

“Just imagine being a teen trying to develop a sense of who you are and where you fit, while everyone you meet tells you, indirectly: You’re not as important as the people on my phone.”

As it was in the New Testament era, so it is now. All of creation, including us humans, is in a state of perpetual groan and decay. But the big picture tells us that groaning and decay are a temporary, middle chapter of the Story of God. The last chapter of this same Story—which has already been written and cannot be revised or edited—promises a coming, eternal reality in Christ with perpetual momentum and bliss. We sing of this reality as we contemplate our Lord’s promise of a coming New Heaven and New Earth:

No chilling words nor poisonous breath
can reach that healthful shore, (where)
sickness, sorrow, pain, and death
are felt and feared no more.

I am bound, I am bound,
I am bound for the Promised Land.

“Felt and feared no more” sounds like a wonderful alternative to sickness, sorrow, pain, and death, doesn’t it?

Another hymn, written by George Matheson (1842-1906) brought a similar refrain:

O Cross that liftest up my head
I dare not ask to fly from thee
I lay in dust life’s glory dead
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be

Life.

That shall endless be.

As the Apostle Paul said confidently in the face of famine and nakedness and sword and as he faced death all day long:

“In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death…nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31-39).

In a world torn up by viruses, political insanity, a shaky global economy, inflation, strained relationships and communities, a loneliness epidemic, and so forth, we can share Paul’s confidence in a future that is lovely and bright.

Tolkien’s belief that everything sad will come untrue, is true. No matter how hard things get in this present and temporal world, the future and everlasting world promises “no death, mourning, crying, or pain” (Revelation 21:4).

Indeed, our best days and years—our Golden Years—are never behind us and always ahead of us. Jesus will make all things new, continuously so, and in such a way that every day will be better and “newer” than the day before. We will no longer grow older, but younger. We will no longer grow weaker, but stronger. As my friend and Nashville singer-songwriter, Jeremy Casella, has said, it will be death in reverse.

We can thank the Lord for the good we cannot see. Our circumstances do not tell the truth about God’s character. Rather, God’s character tells the truth about our circumstances. For “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). This includes the disorienting and defeating stuff of our lives.

George Matheson wrote every verse of “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” (quoted above) from darkness and isolation. At age 20 he was engaged to be married, but learned he was going blind. When he told his fiancee, she ended the engagement because of his newly diagnosed disability. Matheson’s sister then became his caregiver, but only until she got engaged and married herself, leaving her weakened brother to face the darkness on his own.

Matheson, isolated in affliction and sorrow, proceeded to write the beloved hymn. It took him just five minutes, with zero editing.

“O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” like every book of the Bible and almost every priceless work of art, was born from pain. When I’ve sung this hymn alongside others who believe, my worship has been deepened as I’ve looked around and observed, without fail, that the ones who sing the hymn with the most gusto are the sufferers.

As the grief expert, Elisabeth Kubler Ross has said:

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

What enables afflicted souls to keep going, even to keep singing? What empowers them to keep hoping, believing, and pressing forward in the face of gut-wrenching, heart-ripping, life-busting circumstances?

It is the same truth that every Christian has been given for when sickness, sorrow, pain, and death come knocking:

There is a Father whose love will not let us go, a Savior who is coming for us, and a Spirit who will carry us through these middle chapters and get us Home to the final, everlasting one.

World without end.

Amen. Amen.