This is your brain on..well, not drugs.

I attended the first in a 5-week class on Escathology. “Escha-what?” you might ask. Eschatalogy means the study of the last days. Yes, the last days when God judges the world.

I grew up in a Christian home and so doctrine is nothing new to me. I grew up barely resisting or questioning the Bible until in my late teens to my early twenties. My mid twenties (not too long ago to honest) were spent teeter-tottering here and there in my walk of faith–not to be mistaken as a seesawing between belief and disbelief. I always believed and still do believe in who God is to me. It was more a matter of actually applying to my life the grace that was given to me (and at such a cost too).

It’s easy enough for people to qualify their reasons for living a good life–it was simply for the sake of being “good” because it was the “right” thing. But as I sat there in that class, listening to a 27-year old preacher who is a brilliant young man (who had his own bout with atheism in his early years), I couldn’t help but be moved to tears. He spoke of being “eternity-minded”–of living life with eternity in mind.

Let me try and break it down. Let’s say you were told to go to work on a Saturday but you weren’t too sure you were getting extra pay for it, would you go? What if you found out that getting a fat bonus at the end of the year depended on your cumulative weekend overtime? I’m sure you’d come to work with bells on both on Saturday AND on Sunday, am I right? Crude example but it’s all I can extract from my brain (especially considering my brain is still splattered across some wall from last Wednesday’s class). My point is, if we thought about what all this amounted to, if we knew, understood and believed God’s Word about how every word said, every action committed and every thought processed were to be judged in the last days, wouldn’t that somehow change the way you live? If not right now, then at least sometime soon?

I’ve been moaning about some things that didn’t go the way I hoped, or perhaps things that went sour. Some are trivial and some are more monumental. But the bottom line is, those things won’t matter in the end. When I’ve reached the end of my life, I’d like to face God and be told that He is pleased at my faithfulness and that I had lived a life worthy of His eternal presence with me in Heaven.

All of a sudden the trivialities of this world and the nitpicking of people around me didn’t matter at all anymore. The insults hurled and backhanded compliments that were suggested no longer sting as much–or at all. Suddenly my mind was fixed and obsessed with the Eternity that I was going to face. With God’s grace, this is why each day has become easier for me as I learn to move in the unforced rhythms of His grace. I thought I knew Him already. But it turns out that in my 29 years of existence and knowing of God and knowing God, my knowledge of Him isn’t even a close to the size of a bee’s knees! (Bees don’t have knees, but you get my drift)

Who is this God I serve and worship? He’s too great for words! And yet, even as He fills me up, I don’t burst at the seams!

Can’t wait til the next class