The Fly Away Life

Monday 11/12/2012 5:40 AM

My psalm for the week is Psalm 90.  Verse 10 caught my eye as I read this morning.  “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”  I will celebrate my fifty-seventh birthday later this month and for some reason I realized that the seventy years referred to in Psalm 90:10 is only thirteen years away.  The last part of the verse that speaks of passing quickly and flying away certainly hit home to me this morning.

My thoughts began to swirl within my head and I thought about one of the songs I practiced with a men’s octet yesterday entitled I’ll Fly Away.  The implication of the song is that someday I will fly away to a home beyond where everything will be wonderful.  In the meantime, I simply hang on here and long for a better future.

Many Christians today have that same idea, we are simply pilgrims passing through a foreign land on our way to our true home.  Something about that way of thinking seems wrong to me.  If that were all there was to life why would God even bother putting us in this world?  Why not simply make us to be born in heaven where we could live in perfection from the get go?

When God created the world he placed man in the garden and walked with him and they lived together in community.  Man’s disobedience and his desire to be like God was what ruined that relationship and God is at work to reconcile mankind to himself.  God redeems me so that I can have relationship with him and to be an agent of reconciliation in the world, to show the world how life can be lived to the fullest.  God doesn’t want me to long for heaven on earth; he wants me to bring heaven to earth.  I can experience oneness with God and true community with my neighbor today, there is no need to wait for the sweet by and by.  I pray that I can be that kind of person, one who ushers the kingdom of God into this broken world.