Light of Eternity

"My brilliant friend Mitch says that light, unlike anything else in the universe, is not affected by time. Light, he says, exists outside of time. He tells me it has something to do with how fast it travels and that it is eternal." -Blue Like Jazz

"The faster you move, physicists have found, the less you experience time. And if you move at the speed of light, you will never age; you are outside of time; you are an eternal creature. But ... you and I, made from molecules, cannot travel at the speed of light and cannot escape time, at least not with a body." -Through Painted Deserts

"There are bodies in the heavens, and there are bodies on earth. The glory of the heavenly bodies is different from the beauty of the earthly bodies. The sun has one kind of glory, while the moon and stars each have another kind." -1 Corinthians

I don't know if you're making the connection between all these quotations. The idea that light, this thing from the sun, is beyond the grasp of time is really intriguing to me. It seems like if traveling the speed of light could make us live forever many many people would attempt it, but as it says our bodies are made of molecules therefore depriving us of our ability to be eternal. But this sparked another idea in my mind. "Someday we won't have these bodies anymore, the Bible says that very thing!" It says that "when we die and leave these bodies we will have a home in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands."

So, with all this in mind I consider the fact that God has made with his very hands a body for me to reside in all of eternity. This concept is filling my mind and I cannot contain it. Eternity is something I cannot even begin to fathom. "Time has pressed you and me into a book, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was." God has created us for eternity, but because of the brevity of our life we cannot understand it.

Ecclesiastes three tells us that "God has made everything beautiful for its own time." and that "He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end." Because we cannot understand all that God has in store for us. Solomon concludes that "there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to enjoy themselves as long as they can."

So, what does this mean? Are we to go out and party all the time? This sure does sound like what Solomon is telling us. He is telling us to enjoy the things that this world offers us while we can. He is telling us to have fun while we're still here. Later in Ecclesiastes he says, "Enjoy every minute of [your life]. Do everything you want to do; take it all in." But then he warns us: "Remember that you must give an account to God for everything you do."

Solomon tells us to enjoy ourselves while we are here on earth, but that we should bear in mind the fact that we hope to spend eternity with God one day. So we should enjoy ourselves but remember the change God made in our hearts when we formed our personal relationship with Him (Romans 6 reminds us that we were buried and have died to sin); we should let God's glory shine through us by the things that we choose to do.

"If there isn't some glory being shone through us by somebody who has authority, we'll be dead inside, like a little light will go out and our souls will feel dark, like nothing can grow there ... What if, in the same way the sun feeds plants, God's glory gives us life?"

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Quotations taken from: Blue Like Jazz* p.13, Through Painted Deserts* pp. xi, 60, 1 Corinthians 15:40-41, 2 Corinthians 5:1, Ecclesiastes 3:11,12, 11:9, Searching For God Knows What* p.108 --- *by Donald Miller

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