Endings

We finished reading The House at Pooh Corner last night. We are suckers for sentimentality, so we have been putting off the inevitable. I knew it was going to be sad and sad things plus Amelia just aren't a good thing these days. Steve was brave and started reading, "Christopher Robin was going away...." I braced myself and forced myself not to cry through the whole chapter. Then I ran out to the kitchen and got a granola bar to distract myself. Okay, I know that pregnancy hormones probably contribute to the chaos, but why this hyper-melancholy reaction to endings?

Endings of Good Things are getting to me these days because I apply the scenario to my own life. Everything is so jolly right now: I love being married, I love our little house, I love looking forward to having a baby, I love our funny little adventures and the random jokes and stupid misunderstandings and tickling matches and everything that makes life with Steve so splendid. When we read Winnie-the-Pooh, or watch Up! or anything that depicts a simple, happy time between people (or stuffed animals who are like people), I think about us. And when it ends, I think about us ending someday. Hopefully, that someday will be 80 years from now. But life as we know it will still end. That is unbearably sad to think about.

But is it? Does our enjoyment of each other really end? As believers in Jesus Christ, we have the hope of a glorious eternity with Him. That is something in which we should rejoice daily. Still, we have only glimmers (wonderful as they are) of what our eternal life will be like. We don't know if our earthly relationships, even the closest relationships of marriage and/or parenting will have the same bearing on ourselves. Maybe it won't even matter.

Maybe it will matter. C.S. Lewis wrote in "The Weight of Glory" that "if a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desires fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy." The relationship of God the Father with His Son will continue in eternity. The Church will be as a purified bride to her Bridegroom. Maybe the glory of these truths that are shown to us in human relationships will be all the more glorious and deserving of worship because we have experienced them on earth. Maybe our worship of the Lamb will be all the more unthinkable because not only are we joining with those from every tribe, tongue, and nation, but because we are with those believers who we loved so dearly on earth. We are together doing at long last what God intended for us to do.

This is all speculation, of course. But whether the Endings really are Endings, or if they are the Ends to a Beginning, I know that this is true:

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:10

And:

Oh, the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! "For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?" "Or who has given him a gift that he might be repaid?" For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. Romans 11:33-36

I hope that I can sing praises standing next to Steve for eternity. I can't imagine anything better than being able to do what we ache to do together now.