Fall is just around the corner when nights get cooler and leaves ‘turn a myriad of colors and baseball’s pennant race is in full swing. How often do we hear it’s just around the corner? It’s just around the corner for a deserved promotion, a vacation, a relationship or something we wish would happen.
We hope our lives will change in some significant way. Maybe we’re hoping for something different, maybe an adventure, but we end up settling with the usual.
Things happen. God asked Abraham to leave all the things he was familiar with and go to a land he had never seen and winds up wandering for years. Jacob and his sons go to Egypt looking for groceries and four hundred years later Israel pulls up stakes and heads for home. Peter, James and John hear the master and throw their nets aside and follow Him. Whoa!
Is an adventure a thing we make happen or something we choose or does it choose us? As G.K Chesterton said, “An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not something we choose.”
Abraham was not looking for the one true God, but God showed up with an invitation. Many of us can miss the God moments so easily. Our plans and expectations become our hindrances to seeing what is and what can be.
We can get stuck in a perpetual ‘winter of our discontent’ and begin to think that spring will never arrive. We get so committed to arranging our happiness that we miss the signs of spring. We don’t think of what might be around the corner because we think we know what’s coming.
We seek our happiness in temporal things because our hearts have nowhere else to go. Could it be that we make so little of eternity by magnifying the significance of our own lives and diminish the reality of the next life to come?
We make nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. Blaise Pascal
As Christ followers may we deeply embrace what God has said about the life to come and how it impacts us today.
He has set eternity in our hearts. Ecclesiastes 3:11
Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. Colossians 3:1-2
No eye has seen, no ear has heard and no human mind has conceived the things that God has prepared for those who love him. I Corinthians 2:9
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth…but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.Matthew 6:19-21
Even though eternity could be just around the corner it is to be lived today.
