This world keeps turning. It stops for no one. Time keeps ticking. Always speeding forward.I’m not sure if it moves oblivious to what fills it or if it just doesn’t care.
Today we said goodbye. Tears spilled over and down our cheeks. Our hearts swelled and squeezed tight at the bottom of our throats.
I stood and watched this man I know. He’s quite a little man really, and yet today he seemed twelve feet tall as he elegantly composed his final goodbyes to his love of thirty years wife.
A grown up son and daughter stood next to him with lost spaced looks upon their faces. The moments were alien to them. A new reality an unknown enemy. Where had the old reality gone, the one that was a friend back in time when they were cradled in their mother’s arms.
They spoke acceptingly of borrowed time and no regrets.
Yet I frowned with a silent cry to you God of this dreaded curse death. Of goodbyes that tear your heart right out of your chest. And I know you know Jesus of what I’m talking about because you stood facing a rock that hid a body and wept at how death stole your friend’s life right out of this life.
And why is time still moving so fast?
Did your thirty short years upon your creation go by in a blink of an eye?
Thirty short years of time that led you to the place where you hung upon a cross shaped tree that held you until your final breath left your compressed lungs.
But before that exhale you looked upon your mother with love overflowing and as a goodbye gift you gave her into the safekeeping of the friend you loved.
Were the goodbyes more torturous than the Roman torture you had bared? More torturous than the nail piercing chest crushing pain whose effects caused your body to remain hanging empty in time?
Despair Father could easily bed in with the tick tick tick. Hopelessness could shroud over us with every tock tock tock.
Yet, time also brought the third day and with it a sun rose, and with it The Son rose.
Time no longer in control. Death defeated, it has lost it’s sting. The ruler of death is now running destructively frantic, panic stricken because it’s now running out of time to a time, when time stops!
No ticks no tocks just the sound of a snapping crush of a serpent’s head.
Then time can not be the ruthless thief I think it is. Because time takes us to that moment. After the serpents choked out breath is extinguished so time will also exist no more.
What will exist?
A place outside of time where eternity dances. Where “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4 ESV
And so for now we lift our aching heads, we lift our heavy feet and walk with the ticks and the tocks. For we have a hope. A hope now that you Father are with us and nothing happens outside of your care. That you Immanuel is enough.
A hope for when I will say,
“My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”
Song of Songs 2:10-13
In that land of singing, beauty, love and freedom, goodbyes will be unheard of. With you our fragrant Beloved, we will forever be.