A Time For Everything

"He has made everything appropriate [beautiful] in it's time.  He has also set eternity in their heart..." ~ Ecclesiastes 3:11a

Time has a way of changing things.

It can alter our physical appearance.  It can alter our perspectives and attitudes.  It can alter our memories of people and events.  It can mature us.  And it can also heal.

But rarely does it do so quickly.  And never as quickly as we, in our own selfish minds, think it should.  God often has other plans...which tend to include a good number of things we don't particularly like at the time.   

Death is hard.  Doesn't matter whether you're 3 or 103, whether the death was sudden or expected, or whether you felt particularly close to the person.  Neither does it depend upon whether or not you're the "crying type."  It's difficult regardless.  

BUT.

God is still God...God is still good (I suppose those are nearly equal statements, aren't they?).  Dealing with the sudden passing of my dear Mere-mere---a lovely French variation of "grandma"---has been a challenge on so many levels.  It's painful to see how this has affected those around me.  What an imperfect world we live in.

After a week, reality is only just beginning to sink in.  Everything was so sudden that I suppose, somehow, I don't fully realize she's gone.  That she won't be around for my college graduation in another year or so.  That she won't be able to witness my future wedding (if that's the Lord's will for me) or the weddings of my siblings and cousins.  That there's no possibility she'll ever cradle a great grandchild.  Makes my heart sink just thinking about it.

BUT.

God is still God...God is still good.   

Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally, depending on how you look at it), on the very day I was given the news I read something amazing.  A reminder.  Something convicting.  And yet...overflowing with HOPE.  Death isn't the end as these paragraphs of Paul Tripp's writings so vehemently affirm.

"It is sad how many people constantly live in the schizophrenic craziness of eternity amnesia.  We were created to live in a forever relationship with a forever God forever.  We were designed to live based on a long view of life.  We were not made to live with one eye on now and one eye on eternity.  You and I simply cannot live as we were put together to live without forever.  But so many people try.  They put all their hopes and dreams in the right here, right now situations, locations, possessions, positions, and people of their daily lives.  They load moment after moment with undeliverable expectations.  They ask people to be what people this side of eternity will never be.  They demand that a seriously broken world deliver what it could never deliver even if it were not broken.  They fail to recognize that at the bottom of all this drivenness and insanity is an expectation that now can be the paradise it will never be... 

"The evidence is clear―there just has to be more to life than this.  This broken sin-scarred mess can’t be all there is.  And Scripture is clear―this is not paradise, and it won’t be.  Rather, this moment is a time of preparation for the paradise that is to come, where everything that sin has broken will be fully restored to what God originally intended it to be."

    
Wow.  Reading that is like getting smacked in the head by a two-by-four.  Forgetfulness is ever so easy and true faith ever so hard.  It's my prayer that my grandma truly believed these truths... 

You will be forever missed, Mere-mere.