Several Stories
“Anyway, it hasn’t even been that long,” he said to his older brother, taking his hand. “Yeah you’re right,” came the reply. “He’ll be back, promise.”
Although we shouldn’t imagine our lives as marked-out on a timeline, our Christian faith is stifled without hope-filled stories to tell about eternity. And stories take time. The Christian story can be framed as Giver-receiver relationship and we receive everything before we can experience it. This takes time, too. There are two narratives in our minds as we experience the gift that is our lives. One is the story of our sin-stricken bodies and the other is the story of God at work through, for, and in, his own image. These are not two separate lives, but two stories about the same life.
Imagine that in our last moments, on our death beds, the first narrator cries-out in anguish and struggles for a few panicked breaths as the boulder rolls finally into place, sealing his tomb from all future light and life on the dying earth. Imagine that at this exact same moment, however, the other narrator's quiet voice—normally drowned out by the din of distractions—becomes the only voice. We hear it praising God because it is God's voice in us; it’s his Spirit, in whom "we live and move and have our being," and by whom we will have everlasting life. That will be the only voice that will remain in the end.
We can only change what we can author; the moral questions about what we ought to change are necessarily secondary to these natural boundaries. This is doubtless true but it says nothing of the enormity of our task. Are all things within our grasp? If so, then it would be morally necessary to grasp all things and pin them down in order to perfect them because all things are imperfect as we encounter them. Or is it rather that what we are to put into order are invisible things known by some other way than by sense perception? If the former were true, then our limits would be set by phantasmagoria and pinning them down would be an absurd Sisyphean task, as we are made to always perceive objects further out beyond our reach; our natural and good ambition would be a trick played on us, a delusion that we can control what is beyond us spatially and temporally. If it’s true, rather, that we are called to affect all things in some other way, then, even within our small spaces, rightly-ordered ambition actually tracks with eternal truths rather than with fleeting ones that move further away as we reach out to possess them. Of these several stories I am the reader, not the writer.