Rounding The Curve

Rounding the Curve

A loved one lies in a nursing home three hundred miles away, her present life dim and faint compared to the bright history behind and the brighter glory ahead. She is rounding the curve. There is no going back.

An e-mail asks for prayers for a dear friend’s mother, removed from the ventilator and allowed to take as many breaths without it as she will, until, the note said, “she’ll be able to go Home.”

There is a curve we round that opens up the final stretch. Sometimes we see it coming. Sometimes we don’t. But it is certain and absolute. And for the Christ follower, at its end lies the door we’ve been fumbling toward our whole lives. It is not cause for dread. Only the gospel, said Martin Luther, can “make death into sugar, and turn all ills, of which there are plenty, into delectable wine.”^a

We travel toward the curve. Winding or sharp, lingering or brief, we navigate the one-way road between earth and eternity. The race is not timed. The ribbon is not visible. But once begun, we only move forward, never back. There are memories—both sweet and bitter—behind us and unimaginable glory ahead, but the only beauty that exists now is somewhere along the curve. We find it here, or nowhere. The joy discovered here is a real-time taste of something deeper. Something that lasts.

When my sister and I were little, we couldn’t wait to top the last hill on the highway to the sleepy West Texas town where my maternal grandparents, aunt, and uncle lived. We knew the landmarks and sat up straighter in the backseat when they appeared: a railroad bridge, a water tower, a high hill. We eagerly anticipated what waited there for us. Loved ones. Laughter. Hugs. Food. Gifts. Welcome. We didn’t dread the last curve or the crest of the final hill. We strained to see it; longed for it with the pure, sweet longing reserved for only the dearest things.

May God give us the grace to wholeheartedly embrace every last inch of the curve and to live in confident expectation of the longer, lovelier road ahead.

I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.

Philippians 3:13, MSG

^a Eugene F. A. Klug, ed., Sermons of Martin Luther: The House Postils (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996), 1:116.