Where Are You?

Where Are You?

I press on to . . . receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.

Philippians 3:14

When I worked for H. L. Hunt—then the world’s wealthiest man—he once said to me, “Sometimes I wish I could just give all my money away and see if I could make it again. It’s no fun having the money; it’s only fun making it.”

Twentieth-century missionary and theologian E. Stanley Jones wrote about a fictional person who lived out a fantasy life. All he had to do was think of something, and—poof!—it happened. So he stuck his hands in his pockets, leaned back, imagined a mansion, and—poof!—he had a fifteen-bedroom mansion with soft-footed servants to wait upon his every need.

A place like that needs fine cars, so he closed his eyes and imagined the driveway full of the finest cars money could buy. He sat in the back of one of them as a chauffeur drove him wherever he wished to go.

There was no other place to travel, so he returned home and wished for a sumptuous meal—and there it was in front of him. But always there was something more he “needed.”

Finally he grew bored and unchallenged, and he whispered to one of his attendants, “I want to get out of this. I want to create something. I want to earn something. I even want to suffer some things again. I’d rather be in hell than here.”

The servant replied, “Sir, that is where you are.”

It’s the goal that makes life interesting. And that is why heaven is the perfect goal—it’s just out of our reach, calling us ever upward. As poet Robert Browning said, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?”

For a life worth living here, focus on life hereafter.

Heavenly Father, I want my eternal home to be with you in heaven. Help me to stay focused on that goal and to finish the race well. Amen.