Eternity is a really, really long time. (Trust me, I’m a doctor.)
When I was in elementary school, it seemed like it took forever to get through the school year. The winter months after Christmas break were particularly tough to get through. To a little kid, some of those months seemed like an eternity, especially when we had to do gymnastics. (I don’t care what the coaches said; I’m still convinced that the human body wasn’t made to fly through the air upside down and backwards). Every day I went to school thinking I would break my neck and be paralyzed. Those were dark days to a little kid and they seemed eternal. (Who’d have known that 40 years later my childhood fears would come true when I was in a propane fire, went tumbling through the air, and knocked a disc out in my neck which caused nerve damage requiring bone graft and disc fusion surgery?… I wish I could go back and tell the coach that I was right.)
When times are bad, we often have a tendency to:
- Think things can’t get any worse
- Focus on our present turmoil
- Feel like the hardships are taking an eternity to get through
I encourage you to seek a different perspective that can help turn your attitude towards the positive. Consider an eternal perspective: Ask yourself if any of your current hardships will matter 100 years or even 1000 years from now. By the grace of God, 100 years from now we’ll be in heaven with our friends and loved ones, and all of our current concerns will be inconsequential. In heaven, love and joy will be everywhere and forgiveness will be rampant. If it was otherwise, they wouldn’t call it heaven.
Another way to look at life is similar to a Galton board (or bean machine). In a Galton board, balls fall from top to bottom, hitting pegs along the way. Some of the balls fall almost straight down. Others hit lots of pegs, and they wind up falling far to the side. Lots of the balls will fall almost straight down, while others will encounter lots of obstacles and take the long road.
All of us will have some stressful times in our lives, whether that is medical, financial, personal, or legal problems. Some of us may go through life like the balls on the Galton board that pass through with less obstacles and in fairly straightforward fashion. Others will encounter more stress, more obstacles that bump them off their desired path, similar to the balls that bounce to the sides of the Galton board. These are people who might say ‘If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.’ Either way, all of the balls eventually wind up in the same collection bucket at the bottom of the board, regardless of whether they’ve taken the hard or easy path.
In a similar manner, from an eternal perspective, we all wind up in the same place through Christ’s saving grace. Years from now, the path we take (our stressful/hard times), become irrelevant. I encourage you to use this eternal perspective to comfort yourself and reduce anxieties during stressful periods.
When I was in medical school, students would naturally be concerned about the grade we got on tests.
Keep in mind that students in medical school are used to getting straight ‘A’s and destroying the grading curve for everyone else. Naturally, medical students would feel devastated when they got a ‘C’. Faculty would reassure us with the long term (i.e. eternal) perspective:
Faculty: ‘What do you call the medical student who graduates last in his class?’
Student: ‘What?’
Faculty: ‘Doctor’
Yes, the eternal perspective is reassuring. (By the way, if you are one of my patients, don’t worry, I did pretty well…I wasn’t last.)
Remember the eternal perspective and be thankful; after all, it’s a gift from God.
Till next time, may God bless you.