Summer May Be Over, But Life Is Just Beginning

The weather was beautiful, but Hazel and I have talked a lot about how you can feel the crispness of fall in the air, even though the temperature still speaks of summer. We were outside today when she said, “This weather can really do a number on you emotionally.” I knew what she was talking about. We are both extremely sad when summer is over. The coming of fall and then winter is like a metaphor for all of life. With the weather, as with life, the coming seasons sometimes look dark and foreboding as we prepare to leave behind the careless, balmy days of summer for the harsh realities of the winter of our lives.

In a prophesy which alluded to the manner in which Peter would die, Jesus said to him, “When you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish.” What a singularly depressing future to contemplate, and yet, to some degree or another, it is the future that all of us must anticipate as winter approaches. Even without a literal crucifixion which this prophesy foreshadows, the loss of that simple, but glorious, autonomy that allows us to dress ourselves and go wherever we wish, is a very unappealing prospect. Freedom is such a precious gift.

When such disagreeable and unoptimistic thoughts suddenly creep uninvited into our consciousness, it is helpful to remember that according to Jesus, real freedom is not about being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want. It is, rather, about knowing the truth. And in this case, the truth is that as surely as spring follows winter, our predictable earthly demise will be followed by life, not death.

It is sometimes difficult to understand exactly what is meant by believing in Jesus, the single requirement for salvation often cited by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. But one thing it surely must mean is that we must believe what Jesus said when he told disciples “I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”

This is the fact that enabled Jesus and Peter to discuss Peter’s death in such an unemotional and dispassionate way. Peter’s future, like ours, involved life, not death. If this were not the case, as the apostle Paul said, we would be of all men most miserable. But that death shade to which the psalmist, David, alluded in the familiar Twenty-Third Psalm, that walk through the valley of the shadow of death, is but a momentary tunnel through which we must past before emerging into the glorious summer of that place Jesus has gone to prepare for us. Then we will be able to do much more than dress ourselves and go where we wish. Those little freedoms that we valued so highly on earth will be replaced with capacities for joy and exultation we simply and literally cannot now imagine. Again the words of the apostle come to mind, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for them that love him.”

We cannot now examine and investigate things that cannot even be imagined in our heart. We can only believe, or dismiss as untrue, this information Jesus conveyed to us. We can only appropriate these “facts” with the eyes of faith. That is why our belief in Jesus and his words is of paramount importance.

We are faced with the same question Jesus put to Martha durning their discussion about immortality at the graveside of her brother, Lazarus. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” The resurrection of Lazarus to a life of a few more years on this earth was merely an object lesson to illustrates the fact that death is not final, that to those who believe, though we die, yet we shall live. This spectacular miracle was performed to help Martha and the rest of us answer this most important question, “Do you believe this?” The wonderful prospect of living forever in a place of such unimaginable perfection, possibility, and self actualization seems to hinge on our answer to that penetrating question.