I finished praying for a couple of my best friends on this earth when one of my perplexing thoughts arrived. I don't have any idea where I might have heard it, who might have said it, if
it was even said or perhaps a "fig newton" of my imagination. But in the deep recesses of
my mind's filing cabinet I've pulled out: "life is like entering a very
long movie that has already started and then learning that you have to leave it
before it ends." It is at once an analogy I appreciate but at times find troubling. Watching the PBS movie, Victoria, there is a scene where as much as Lord Melbourne would like to stay on as the 18-year-old Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, at her begging, he knew his time was up and he had to depart. I felt a bit melancholia at the moment. Kind of interesting thought, especially for me watching any movie. But it was there again when I ruminated on being united with Christ; as a reality, and a hope, which I profess: "My days
are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass. But you, O LORD, sit
enthroned forever; your renown endures through all generations." I just read this a couple of weeks ago while at Quiet Rest from Psalm 102. Even so, entering a movie already started
and leaving before it ends also means that I, almost always, entirely, miss the
point.
St. Augustine's Confessions is beside my recliner at Quiet rest and every time I take it up I seem to come uncomfortably
face to face with myself, and with it, the thought that someone has already
told my story or at least very real parts of it. It is this shock of
recognition that seems always to awaken me to my own pride and makes real the
danger of missing the point. In Augustine, as does John Piper's: The Hidden
Smile of God and Timothy Keller's:
Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, just finished; seeing how countless
others suffered and wrested (new word for me) with God long before me, I am reminded that I am
a small character in a much greater story. I think it is important for me to
intentionally recognize that I have entered a movie that has already started,
and not be ticked off that it's not all about me.
I'm realizing more and more these days that there is a vast stage full of lives
who have wrestled with questions quite similar to my own. Men and women who
have gone centuries before me and have lived with the same doubts and faith,
pains and hope. Many have lived aware, often more than I ever will hope to be,
of life as it existed before them and time that would march beyond them. Many
have lived to "tell the old, old story," that they might take it in
to be their own. For they saw with the writer of Ecclesiastes that it is important
to realize there is "nothing new under the sun," lest I miss the sun
entirely by focusing only on the shadows I watch it cast. They saw that it is
important I see the vapor of my life specifically because there is a permanence
to life itself, a story with an end and a beginning.
Jesus once turned to His disciples and said, "Blessed
are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings
wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but
did not hear it". The disciples
were seeing in the present all that kings and prophets looked for at a
distance. Yet even those who walked intimately with Christ were not always
aware of all there was to see. There is absolutely not a doubt in my mind this
morning that I am missing Him too.
I'm thinking that if life is really like entering a movie that has already
started and leaving before it ends, it is important to look both behind me and up
the road in order to see what is in front of me. I have just become aware that
there is only one place in Scripture where God is referred to as the "Ancient
of Days" and
of the interest that it significantly comes from the lips of one indelibly marked
by the present. "As I looked," says Daniel describing a
dream, "thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of
Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was
white like wool. His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze"
(7:9). This one addressing God as sovereign over days long before his own is
someone who could have been overwhelmed with the small picture of life before
himself. Jerusalem was in ruins; God's people were scattered. Daniel could have
easily viewed his situation as being stuck somewhere in the middle of a movie
he wasn't happy with, yet he chose to see beyond the troubling scene in which
he was living. And he saw the "Ancient of Days" in the midst of the days
he was given.
Father, God, I thank you for Your hand in setting my entry on earth into Your story of eternity
and at Your pleasure will leave this earth before eternity. Thank You for showing me I can still live
with sight beyond my own—looking back at lives of faith and You in history,
gazing forward at all that You have promised, seeing all that You have placed
before me. Though the picture before me sometime seems unfair, and life is not always
what I bargained for, there is a story. My life is in the evening shadows, but I'm
committed to living within the greatest story ever told. Amen
