Everlasting

Everlasting

Several years ago a precious, thirty-year-old Bible was mysteriously lost to me. This battered, twice rebound, long-loved book had seen me through so many joys, doubts, struggles, and triumphs of my Christ-following life! To hold it was to hold a well-marked road map of the way God had led me so far. I celebrated like crazy when it came home to me through a set of circumstances only he could have engineered. Then just a few months later, I wailed like a baby when it was destroyed.

During a stretch of days that involved longer-than-normal absences from home, my beloved Bible proved too great a temptation for my teething pup Burley to resist. I left one morning for the hospital and ended up staying most of the day and late into the evening. Unfortunately, I also left Burley and the Bible alone together. When I arrived home, my normally enthusiastic dog was strangely shy. When I looked into my study, I saw the reason why. Scattered on the rug were pieces of cover and spine, wads of gnarled text, maps with strange new borders, and hand-lettered notes turned into soggy hieroglyphics.

I was heartbroken. I fell to the floor and sobbed, gathering the pages back together and holding the whole mess to my chest. I screamed at Burley. He cowered in his crate. I hit the floor with the heel of my hand so hard I had a bruise for a week. Finally I placed the whole mess into a box and stored it out of sight. But not out of mind.

Then I read a quote from Michael Downey in his book Altogether Gift that pulled me up short: “Human life, all of it, is the precinct of epiphany—of God’s showing, of God’s constant speaking and breathing.”^a My life—not the pages of my old Bible—contains my spiritual history. So does yours. Monuments of faith are not everlasting, not even the dearest ones. God is. His love is. By his great sacrifice those things belong to me, and I can never lose them. They are incorruptible, immutable, everlasting . . . and mine.

I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, holding the everlasting Gospel to proclaim to the inhabitants of the earth.

Revelation 14:6, PHILLIPS

^a Michael Downey, Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 35.