The inevitability of endings

Endings. Everything from time spent on the beach, a good book, a great meal, a noteworthy career, or as simple as the candy in the candy bowl. Some of them are replentishable, easily replaced, and others are difficult to match, and never truly forgotten.

This has been an amazing week. (I'll see if I can't post a few pics here, but if you know me on FB there are some almost 300 pictures up there at the moment.) I've gotten to see, hang out with, and talk with some family members I haven't gotten to do that with in a very long time. (Something, perhaps, I did not know I was missing until I experienced it.) Here we are at the almost end of it, with medical tests, pokings, and drugs looming just over the next rise and my desire to replay these past two weekends is very strong.

I am tired from late nights, health issues and a lot of extra time spent with people, but this past week was a great week and one I hope we can duplicate again, and often, this side of heaven. I have to confess that I think perhaps my schedule and treatments made me focus a little more on myself and in focusing on getting better I forgot about the things like family as I strove to find a cure for my ailments. The benefits I have had emotionally this week rival that of any healing skill MDA has leveled at me these past few years. That is probably the hardest and most convicting paragraph I have written in a very long time. I've learned a lot this weekend and i don't think it's an accident that it happened while I was away from the "normal" things of my strange life.

It's at times like these when I am faced with such a big reminder to how different things could have been or how they could be so drastically different from the way they are now, that I find myself thinking about heaven. I've been thinking a bit lately about different views of the afterlife and how, for some reason, the one that is prevalent in our culture, really almost despite your Faith and what it tells you, is that whatever happens after life is boring. I just spent an amazing week with family where we didn't really have anything to do other than enjoy the weather, eat, hang out with each other, and go exploring. How is that not a model for how Heaven will be like? God created us for life, and so I would assume that Heaven, as a reward for life, would have to be amazing. Just like a week of vacation is a reward for a year of hard work. Or like a great retirement, you now have the tools and the resources to do amazing things. I don't think Heaven is going to be boring, I think it'll be the time when we have the resources to do some things we never had time to do here on Earth, and it'll be in a completely different way than we could have done it here. It's not a fully fleshed out thought, but the more I think about it the more I don't buy into boring at all.

But it takes a pretty drastic ending to get there. Perhaps that is the point of all the little endings in life... To prepare us for bigger endings. But you know it's not JUST about the endings. As we face an ending we also are faced with beginnings and we also need to know how to handle those just as effectively as we face a good farewell party.

Thanks team.


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~B.

Ben Morrell

Skype: OCBenMorrell

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