I Am Rewarded

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

—Matthew 16:25

It’s a difficult tension living with one foot on earth and the other reaching for heaven.

Perhaps that’s why, for the majority of my life, I kept both feet firmly planted on earth.

It’s not that I didn’t think about eternity. When a pastor preached on the subject or I read a Bible verse about heaven or I attended a funeral, I’d give mortality a passing glance. I knew the end would one day come. But the knowing didn’t seem to change the living, at least not too much. Who wants to spend her life thinking about death? A morose way to live, I thought.

Until death knocked on my door.

Then I didn’t have much of a choice.

In spite of my attempts to shove thoughts of death and dying to the side, they wouldn’t be ignored. For thirty-nine years, I lived as if ignorant of the guarantee of death. Overnight, it became the only thing I could think about.

Thus began a year or two of desperate attempts to preserve my life. I changed my diet and added more exercise. I avoided toxic candles and cleaning supplies, and I signed up for weekly yoga. When I wasn’t searching the internet and talking to doctors about various cures, I prayed like a fasting monk for God to deliver a mountain-moving miracle.

Then death knocked on my door a second time. And a third.

Suddenly all those years of self-preservation efforts seemed silly. Futile. And something occurred to me: the numbering of my days here on earth isn’t up to me; it’s up to the one who numbered them long before I was born.

Job, a man well acquainted with pain and suffering, found comfort in this assurance: “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed” (Job 14:5).

If Job’s words are true, then all my efforts to save myself were nothing more than futile attempts to play God. There’s nothing wrong with being a good steward of life and health, of treating this gift of life with humility and care. But in the end, I mustn’t forget: I’m not God; He is.

But I learned something else during those desperate months contemplating death. In all my obsession with this life, I’d failed to celebrate the next one. I’d forgotten that the real gift isn’t our humanity; it’s eternity. That’s the reward we’re waiting for.

Our human nature hosts an incredible will to live. I’ve seen friends plagued with pain fight for years before taking their last breath. We have such determination to overcome, a survival mechanism that keeps us pressing on when we want to quit.

But this gift was never meant to eclipse a greater one. Eternity is the ultimate reward. And the only way to receive that gift is to let the lesser gift go.

On the island of Patmos, God gave John, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, a revelation of the reward to come. John received it with both trembling and joy, experiencing and then recording his visions of the second coming of our Christ. Justice for wrongdoing. Redemption for the repentant. And an eternity absent tears in the presence of absolute glory.

Too often, however, I’m so caught up in my daily life that I miss the sweetness of my eternal one. Like a toddler so enamored with wrapping paper that he misses the thrill of a new toy, I only have eyes for this life and miss the beauty of the one yet to come. But as Jesus said, “To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne” (Rev. 3:21). This is the reward we’re waiting for. If we give this life to Him, there is a new and better life waiting for us.

Perhaps we don’t spend enough time talking to each other about heaven. It feels too far off and distant, hard for a human mind to comprehend. And yet talking about it also creates appreciation for it, not to mention no small amount of anticipation.

Yes, it’s difficult living with one foot on earth and the other reaching for heaven. And yet it’s the only way to truly live. Want to save your life? Go ahead and spend every effort in desperate preservation. It won’t matter, you know. One day we’ll have to face the fact this life was never really ours to save.

Instead, trust the one who already knows the number of your days, and life—real life—will be waiting for you. Steward this life, yes. But don’t fail to be a joyful dreamer of heaven. The real reward isn’t what’s in front of you. The reward is what is yet to come.

Keep yourself as a stranger here on earth, a pilgrim whom its affairs do not concern at all. Keep your heart free and raise it up to God, for you have not here a lasting home. To Him direct your daily prayers, your sighs and tears, that your soul may merit after death to pass in happiness to the Lord.

—THOMAS Á KEMPIS, THE IMITATION OF CHRIST