Engineered For Eternity

An Excerpt from Olde Mysterium:

Saba closed his eyes and breathed deep. “My time here on this earth is coming quickly to a close. Oh how fast it has fled me. Have you ever wondered at how people are engineered for eternity?…I have never met an old man that didn’t wish he could live longer. Eighty years. Ninety years. Even a century old. It doesn’t matter. We might want to go to end the pain but never because we are finished with life. The human spirit is engineered to want to live. To live forever. We don’t understand it. I don’t understand it because our experience on this earth is designed to be finite. Everything here has an expiration date except the human spirit.”

Saba’s face pulled taut into a mass of wrinkles for a moment but then subsided. Daniel offered to go find a nurse but the old man protested, keeping his grip firm on his son’s hand. “Will you do something for me?”

Daniel nodded. “Absolutely. Anything you want.”

“Kneel by my bedside.”

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“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die;’” ~John 11:24-26

The sun sets only to rise again. Plants die off in Winter only to reemerge in Spring. Among the many things in our existence that point to life beyond the grave, I would have to admit that one of the strongest arguments for me personally is the human will to live. Nobody wants to grow old. Nobody wants to grow infirm. And nobody wants to die. For the soldier surrounded by the enemy and the guilty man on death row each must face their fate, but neither of them wish for it. We inhabit finite bodies and exist in a broken world. Death comes to us all in this life but we don’t want it. The human desire for life is infinite and we are each engineered for eternity. And eternity is a gift given to each of us…should we so choose to accept it.

I often ponder upon the idea that this life is very much like being in utero and upon death we are reborn into the reality we were originally designed to inhabit…if only we would follow the One who breathed life into us. Are you engineered for eternity?

SOLI DEO GLORIA!