Into the Fire

Have you ever wondered if this is all there is? Life on planet earth, then decomposition?

I’ve always believed in heaven—even when I didn’t know how to get there. Even when all I believed in was God but didn’t live for Him because I didn’t know how without Jesus. I couldn’t imagine life being any other way besides having a master plan, someone so much greater than man to have put things together. I’ve always been clearly aware of my own faults and shortcomings as well as those of human beings in general. That’s one reason I could never embrace the Catholic faith—and this is not a slanderous comment, it’s simply a fact in my own life since my Dad was the son of immigrant Italian parents and was born into Catholicism. He died a Christian. The idea of going through a priest and believing he was able to make sins right somehow didn’t register with me. After all, he was just a man, a human being like me, too.

Think about it, though. Think about your lowest points of existence in this life. Think about the times you wondered if you could cope another minute let alone make it through unpredictable tomorrows. If you had no hope of an eternity, how easy would it have been to cut the bonds of life and end it all? I faced one brief moment in my teen years of human angst with hormones raging, staring down the thought of suicide, looking up into a cleaning closet at a poisonous chemical until right thinking prevailed. If I had listened to the destructive lies of the enemy of my soul at those ponderous moments, he could’ve cheered with glee at having gotten a chalk mark on his hell-bound blackboard.

God had better plans for me, even though it took too many years for me to find His Son, leaving a wake of sinful behavior and a suitcase full of regrets when I moved out of Satan’s kingdom and into the Lord’s strong tower.

As a parent, I shudder at the thought of losing my sons. They’re adults now, but it doesn’t matter. They’re my beloved offspring, gifts from a wonderful Creator. We can’t imagine the grief. Yet, my Grandmother lost both of her daughters (my Mom and her sister) before she left the planet. Parents lose infants and children of all ages or are the victims of horrible, inescapable events which leave their children helpless or crippled or dying. Who can bear even the thoughts of such sorrow? Even with the Savior of our souls, it is an impossible journey we would never volunteer to take and once it is upon us, we challenge the Lover of our souls to explain what kind of love would allow such a thing.

And then we have the account of the slaughter at Virginia Tech. A “troubled loner” taking it upon himself to assassinate as many individuals as he could before turning the weapon on himself and slipping into eternity with the rest of his victims. In the days to come we’ll see gut-wrenching interviews, hear eye witness accounts from the escapees, see videos (if we watch) of the carnage, and hear both truth and lies regarding the despicable scenario of mass murder.

We’ll cringe as parents realizing that the last brief moments of those kids’ lives were filled with terror and pain before eternity blasted them with as much force as the gunshots. Think about it.

Sometimes we take our Christianity too sedately. We are here for a divine purpose. It isn’t random. As humans who’ve found and embraced our Lord Jesus Christ, we all have certain priorities encapsulated in the Acts 1:8 farewell speech of the risen Christ. He didn’t designate a certain amount of clever, outgoing, smart, dumb, intellectual, street-smart, younameit, etc. people to be His witnesses. It was supposed to be the benchmark for our motives behind everything we do here as we work out our salvation with “fear and trembling”.

Because, as sad and horrific as yesterday’s massacre was, the starkness of the event reveals that those victims of inexplicable violence are now engaged in eternity, and that, my friends, is their eternal “resting” place. Only those of us who believe the Word of God to be Truth and infallible—we know there is no “resting” for some of those unfortunate people. Their number of days was up yesterday, April 16, 2007, and there is nothing anyone can do about it now.

Think about that.

Dear God, I know you weep over the lost. Yet your word tells us “men are without excuse”. You’ve made it clear by what’s been created and with your “eternal power and divine nature” that you are visible and available to anyone who cares to look for you. We only have so many days here. God, in the Name of your Son Jesus Christ, let me never neglect to do your will. Please, God. Nothing matters aside of what you have for us to do here. Nothing lasts beyond what you ordain. Oh, God, let us remember eternity waits for all of us. Let us be ready and help others find you so they can be ready, too. Help us, God. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.