SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

wc-curtain            Perhaps the only thing William Claude Dukenfield and I have in common is that we both think he is uproariously funny.  Mr. Dukenfield (better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields) was born in the 19th Century; I was born in the 20th.  He was raised in a large city – Philadelphia, I was raised outside a small town.  He was an alcoholic, I took some Nyquil once.  He loathed children (especially his own), I am silly for them (especially mine.)  He could juggle 30 cigar boxes, I can juggle 2 oranges if they are not too large.  He was a star of stage and screen, I get to do songs at VBS once a year.  But I felt an affectionate kinship with him last week.

            There is a great line from one of his films where a child, entering the bank where Fields is a security guard, says “Look Momma at that man’s big, red nose!”  “Don’t be rude,” the mother replies, “wouldn’t you like to have a nose just like that……..full of nickels?”

            Last week at camp, a girl said something nice about me to her mother, and described me as “that older man.”  “He’s not that old,” her mother replied, “I’ll bet he’s only a few years older than your grandpa.”  The insult added to the injury was that the girl was 13.  Maybe, Mr. Fields, you were right about children after all.

 

            What makes losing ground to time so difficult is that time ravages us at different rates, and seems not to ravage some of us at all.  Some of us are Dorian Gray, and some of us are his picture.  Some of us are his picture after severe water-damage and molding.  Paul talks candidly about the tension we experience as inhabitants of temporal bodies in II Corinthians 5. 1-10.  When we read ahead to chapter 11  we are sure he knows that tension intimately – with a body scarred by beatings and emaciated by hardship.  But the tension he talks about is not so much the decay of our temporary bodies, but the fact that we are in them at all, when we belong elsewhere – in eternity.

For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan being burdened, because we do not want to be naked, but clothed, in order that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. v.4

            The tough thing, then, about inhabiting a temporal body is that they are meant to be temporary.  No one expects one of those Dollar Store rain ponchos to be used more than once.  They can’t even be folded more than once.  In God’s grand plan of things our human bodies are like Dollar Store rain ponchos – for brief use until we get where we are supposed to stay.  Letting our pride in our appearance define us is like boasting that we have the fanciest rain poncho.

            The main thing to remember is that we don’t belong here anyway.  The groaning Paul speaks about isn’t for lost youth, but for heaven, for home.  The writer of Ecclesiastes, after his famous description of the patterns of life, reminds us that God has “placed eternity” in our hearts – an awareness that we are not where we are supposed to be, and that apart from God we never will be (Ecclesiastes 3. 1-11).

            One day we will no longer live in this box of four dimensions (including time) but will exist apart from physical dimension.  Eternity isn’t time without end, it is an end without time.  That hasn’t happened yet, but as we age we get closer to it.  As we age then, we do not lose ground, we gain it.

 

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