Friday, December 5, 2008

[God] Will Wipe Away Every Tear From Their Eyes, and there will be no more death, neither will there be any more sorrow or crying or any more pain, Because THe Former Things Have Gone Away. Rev. 21:4.

Will God wipe away tears by causing us to forget all the hardships and suffering of this life? Or will we remember the hurts celarly, yet they won't devastate us anymore? How far will the "former things" have gone away? I suspect we will still remember, but the pain will be gone. The memories of our personal history are worth retaining-they are part of who we are and what we have become. When memory has lost its power to wound, it still retains its capacity to develop depth of character.

Those severely wounded by life can find it hard to imagine that time could strip painful events of their power to cause tears. But with God's help it can happen. And sometimes the process doesn't take long.

My youngest daughter and i staggered out of our beds at 1:30 in the morning. Recently baptized in the Red Sea, she had committed to a night climb of Mount Sinai. We set out with several others at 2:00 a.m., trailed by camel drivers certain we wound't make it to the top without help. "Camel, good camel, very nice," they  mumbled to each of us every five minutes.

The darkness was deep, broken only by flashlights. As we dug the toes of our atheletic shoes into the scrabbly red soil of the mountain, occasional shooting stars flashed by behind us. The 7,400-foot mountain became steeper and steeper as the path approached the great wall that signaled the last third of the climb. The camel drivers continued to follow, certain that some of us would soon succumb to muscular gridlock. And some did. But my daughter forged determinedly on.

The steepest part of the climb is the legendary staircase to the top -750 steps carved almost vertically out of the red rock. Rest stops became more and more frequent as bodies cried out for mercy. But we made it! No camels! No donkeys! Just sore muscles.

By midmorning my daughter and I returned to our hotel. She flopped facedown on her bed and lay absolutely still for a moment. Then her head popped up, and she said, "Remind me to never, ever, ever do anything like that again!" Her head dropped facedown into her pillow, and I didn't hear from her for several hours.

A few days later in Germany a bright-eyed girl looked up eagerly at me, without warning, and said, "Dad, when can we climb Mount Sinai again?" it took me by surprise, but it shouldn't have. The memory was fresh, but the pain had vanished. You could say that "former things" had gone away, yet in another sense they had not.

Lord, give me patience to make it throughthis day, knowing I dam one step closer to the new earth that You have in mind for us.