Living Forever

2 Corinthians 5:8, “We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.”

Driving into work the DJ’s on the radio got into a discussion about vampires. One said to the other that it wouldn’t be so bad to be a vampire, never aging and living forever. Immediately I thought to myself that would be terrible to live forever.

Think about it. Would you want live forever in the corruption and slow death this world is going through, only knowing God and His beauty in the spirit and in part? This is a world of tribulation and death. Sardines are born in the millions so that a few survive the ravishing of fish and fisherman alike. And though we exist on the very top of the food chain while sporting an earth suit called a body, we still suffer too by the millions. Whole continents have generations of occupants who primarily know famine and death. Billions are without freedom. This place called earth is no heaven. Quite to the contrary Jesus taught us heaven is inside us, never on the outside. And so I have to repeat what Dusty Kemp taught me years ago.

For those saved this is the only hell we will know. For those who are perishing, this is the only heaven they will know.

As for me, I don’t want to live forever. I would like to live long enough to know my children’s children, but beyond that… there is nothing special holding me to this celestial body as magnificent as it can be.

What a freedom this brings. To know, to live in a place, that at least for a moment I can say with the fullest of conviction that there is nothing on earth worth living forever for. Oh that this revelation might make me a better son, father, husband, employee… That it might make me more like Christ. That it might lead to a more abundant life as Jesus promised He would bring.