Eternal joy and wretched happiness

It's an unreal world.

We are internal people mercilessly shoved around by external expedients. Not ourselves, but what we are, in most cases, forced to be, in one sense or another. It would be right to say that, for most of our lives, we react rather than respond. And we tire of reacting, so when there is nothing to react to, we are too exhausted to respond.

Inside of us, a gentle river flows. A rivulet, if you will.... a brook. It is eternal.

Much as the happenstances of our lives force us to think that this life, these few years, are all there is ever going to be, we find no peace in believing that this is, in fact, true. We find ourselves drawn to thinking about what we leave behind, how people would remember us when we are gone. We'd rather that our lives "lived" forever, in the people we leave behind. This sometimes brings a liberating exhilaration; we live "in hope".

We are mortal, with an overpowering sense of eternity trapped inside our frail being.

Someone put it like this - "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Never was eternity trapped within such a frail, fragile, tottering receptacle - our lives. The thought of being eternal staggers us so much that we close ourselves to it; it's too big, too incomprehensible, too awesome. But those incurable, deep, deep longings never leave us....... How can we be merely mortal, we wonder, when our deepest longings are things the finest earthly joys cannot even reach, let alone satisfy?

That river, that brook inside.......it flows on through us, out of us, to connect with those after us, and from there on to all of humanity, for all of time. For, verily, will not people remember us long after we've gone? fondly, some, even achingly with longing, and some with thankfulness that we are gone, because of the terror we brought...... And we want to be remembered.

But for now, the moments of our lives are mundane, rote, some of us cruelly restricted, others too free to find any meaning, most of us just plain nondescript and featureless, with bleak, hopeless tomorrows, never able to see our sorrows and grief in perspective, much less our brief and feeble happiness. In our ordinary moments, all thoughts of eternity, which had seemed so overpowering in our reflective and insightful moments, seem unreal and not worth our effort.

And in between these two kinds of moments, we endlessly flit all through our lives, fickle and wretched, not able to grasp and hold either moment, much less believe. And we chase the wind magnificently while letting the moments slip through our fingers. "We live as if we would never die, and die as if we'd never lived", as someone put it so truly.

Where can we find something that time, seasons, circumstances, life itself, cannot rob from us? Where can we find this thing and carry it with us forever? How can we not die but live for ever?

Thank God.....He found a way.