Grains of Sand

This weekend was marked by attending a memorial service for a 10 year old girl we knew from our time at Anchor Center.  Such an event inevitably brings me into processing many philosophical ideas about life, our purposes, and the role of God in tragedies.  Beginning with our response to the pandemic and further developed after the school shooting in Uvalde, I’ve had these half realized thoughts rolling through my head about the role of God’s grace in death, particularly the death of children.  Tragedy so often brings the question of “How could a good God let this happen” to the forefront of conversations and my late night ponderings.  But amidst those questions has been this lurking knowledge that our human perspective on death is so backwards from God’s eternal perspective.  When you stop for just a second and try to get some distance from life as you know it, you get a glimpse at how painfully foolish it is that we spend so much of our lives fighting against death, while still knowing death is the one thing we are all guaranteed in the end.  Our lives here on earth will all end and yet we devote an obscene amount of energy throughout our lives desperately trying to hold off the inevitable.  It is shocking how utterly irrational we are when it comes to death. (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/19/doubting-death-how-our-brains-shield-us-from-mortal-truth)

So amidst all of this pondering, I kept getting glimpses of a truth God was trying to show me but I could never quite see clearly.  There was something hiding there about the grace of God in death and the limits of human perception in relation to eternity.  But I couldn’t manage to piece all of those thoughts together into a cohesive idea.  We spent the memorial service listening to stories and watching photos and videos of so many moments of joy in this sweet girl’s short life.  And in those moments, there is a profound juxtaposition between the joy found in life and the pain of its end.  

As I was driving home from the memorial service this picture came to me and the fuzzy thoughts that I’ve been squinting at for months (maybe even years) finally began to come into focus.  Imagine that each moment of joy in life is a grain of sand placed in a beautiful bottle.  The newborn snuggles, toddler giggles, pride in learning a new skill, moments of laughter with friends, sparks of new love, accomplishing a long worked for goal, holding your sleeping child, eating a delicious meal, watching a beautiful sunset, and on and on are each grains of sand slipped one by one into that bottle.  At the end of life your bottle might be filled to the top by a long and well lived life, or less full by a life marked by bitterness, or less full by a joyful life cut short.  

Here’s the beautiful part.  The joys to be found in eternity with God are not grains of sand limited by a bottle, rather they are all the grains of sand on those beaches you’ve seen that just stretch on and on as far as your eyes can see.  When your bottle of joys is poured out on the beach of your eternal joy it doesn’t matter whether you had 10 years of joys or 100 because the joys waiting for you to behold outnumber those even to be found in the best and longest life on earth a million times over.  How beautiful is the grace of God given to us which allows us to enter into that beach and walk with Him.  We need not be reckless with our lives, but there is freedom in joyful anticipation of death as a passage into eternal joy and healing.  Grace has been given to those children who have passed “too soon” from this world where we see but glimpses and shadows of real love, joy, peace, freedom.  They are reveling in the full manifestation of those which is beyond our earthly comprehension.  

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.  If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know!  I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far;  but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.  Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith,  so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me. 

Philippians 1:21-26