Adjusting My Lenses

Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to someone who has been down the trisomy 18 road several years ago. As she was sharing her story, she told me that she had immediately realized that in order to get through this, it became absolutely vital that head knowledge become something much more real. How true that has been for me! Things that I have believed in my head up to this point now have to be swallowed and embraced much deeper inside of me. For example, it struck me the other night as we sang “Wherever He Leads I’ll Go” that that beautiful hymn has new meaning when I sing it than it ever has before. I believe that in the past there have been times when I have truly tried to think about those words and pray in my heart “Yes, Jesus, please help me to be willing to follow You wherever you lead, whether it is a path I want or something that I don’t.” The only thing is, until this point in my adult life, He hasn’t led me down a path that had more than a few pebbles to clutter the road—maybe a small rock or two at most—but certainly no boulders! Now when I sing those words, I know that I mean them. I know in a much deeper way that I can trust God to take care of me, even when the path He has led me to is much darker than I would have ever expected.

So, in many ways, it has been great to be able to take the truths I have known and actually experience them in a way that I’ve never had opportunity to do before. But, there is one area in particular that I feel like I’m really struggling to grasp and comprehend: Eternity. I remember at many instances in my life, from the time I was a little girl on up, trying to truly get my mind around the concept of heaven going on forever. Each time I have tried to grasp the idea of eternity, my mind falls so short that it almost leaves me with a feeling of terror. Not because I am scared of heaven, but because I am scared that I cannot comprehend in my mind what eternity really is. I can only see things as I see them here within the framework of time. My inadequacy to be able to grasp how temporal this life is makes me more afraid of the “bad” things that happen to me while I’m here. I’m frustrated because I know that if I could truly get it, if I could see time and circumstances as God sees them, then I would know with everything in me how the word “short” doesn’t even begin to describe the amount of time God has given me here. He asks us to live by faith for a fraction of time that cannot even be measured in the light of eternity.

Yet, I feel like even though I know that in my head, I can’t make myself believe it in my heart with a certainty that makes our current reality seem small in comparison. There is a song that says,

“Turn you eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.”

This is one of my prayers right now. I want God to reveal to me in a new way how the sorrows of this earth, while very real, are very, very short! If I can just see things through different lenses, then I think the reality of the pain and separation will not seem as overwhelming. Philippians 3 ends with a couple of verses I’ve really tried to absorb into my heart and mind. They say “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory…” With everything in me, I want to get this. I want to be able to glimpse my life with eyes focused on eternity.