A dot of misery

"For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." - Romans 8:18 (KJV)

Years ago our old pastor (pastor Greg) said that the word "life" in the bible has a couple of meanings. Life could be either mean our life on earth, or it could mean our eternal life in heaven. And to clear up the confusion when ever he read the word life he would replace it with either the word "Dot" or "Line". His illustration was a dot on a really long line and he said that the dot represented our earthly life and the line represented our eternal life. He mentioned this so that we would really see how brief we were really here on this earth.

In one of his sermons that many a pastor has done was titled, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" and one of his many points was that how short of time we were on this planet. He illustrated it with a long rope and he explained that the rope represented his life and he had the tip of this yellow rope colored red. He said that he colored it red 1 inch for every 10 years of life and he said that he was optimistic and gave himself 10 inches. He pointed to at the beginning of the red part and mentioned how painful birth was. Then he pointed to different parts of the 10 inches and mentions good and bad times. Happy and painful times but as soon as the pain of death ended (which by the way remember your last breath on earth is your first breath in heaven) the rest is bliss bliss bliss bliss for eternity.

So how long is eternity? It is hard to wrap our brain around eternity because we don't think in those terms. We think of everything having an end, everything being finite.  I found a website that had a great example of how long it would take to use eternity up that is posted on the bottom. 

How long is eternity? Imagine a great bird that could fly nonstop without ever needing to rest. Let us say that it were possible for this bird to fly to the planet Jupiter at one mile per hour. Let’s pretend that God gave this huge bird an assignment: “Take every grain of sand from planet Earth to Jupiter— one at a time! ”

Picture this huge bird as it takes the first grain of sand in its beak and begins to flap its enormous wings. Envision it lifting off the ground and flying upward and upward until it disappears into the sky. It arrives 44,520 years later at Jupiter—a distance of 390 million miles from earth—and upon landing, drops the first grain of sand onto the planet. Then immediately, it makes the return trip to Earth—a round-trip of 780 million miles, or 89,040 years, for just one grain of sand.

How many years would it take to transport every single grain of sand off the face of the earth in this manner? Whatever it is, it would not even scratch the surface of eternity. When the bird returns from taking the last grain of sand to Jupiter, eternity would still be as long as it was when he had left with the first grain of sand!

So live for the line not the dot.  Because remember we all have eternal life, we just get to choose (because of freewill) where we spend it.