SUNDAY SERMON: Nothing on earth can be equated to everlasting life
The clock stops in some strange sense that only you can perceive. You become totally absorbed in something you enjoy. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- I have no statistics on this issue. I don’t know if psychologists have ever studied it.
- I wonder if they can study this phenomenon, because it cannot be planned or repeated at will.
It doesn’t happen often, but most people know the experience. The clock stops. I don’t mean literally. If there is a clock in the room, it keeps ticking. The clock stops in some strange sense that only you can perceive. You become totally absorbed in something you enjoy.
It’s not that the feeling of being filled with joy seems to last a long time. Instead, you have somehow been freed from time, without having made any effort to do so. It just happened, and you don’t even notice that it has happened. In fact, you don’t even notice your own existence. You are so absorbed in the experience that you have forgotten your own existence.
I have no statistics on this issue. I don’t know if psychologists have ever studied it. I wonder if they can study this phenomenon, because it cannot be planned or repeated at will. However, based on conversations with others, I suspect it happens to many people. Maybe not all.
Maybe some people have never known that kind of joy. But based on what I’ve seen, a lot of people know what I am trying to describe, even if they find it impossible to explain what it’s like. We could call that kind of experience a “clock-stopper.”
Jesus often used a phrase to describe the reward that is waiting for us in the next world if we are faithful to him. It is something he called “eternal life.” Think of it as a clock stopper where the clock never starts ticking again.
Eternal life strikes some people as negative. “Life everlasting” might feel more like a curse than a reward.
Anyone watching the succession of days on a calendar and the slow march of the second hand on a clock knows how the passage of time can feel like an unbearable burden. My grandmother had a saying to express the tension that this often makes us feel: “If you watch a kettle, it never boils.”
Eternity is something more wonderful than an endless number of days or years. A good way to explain it comes from one of the saints: “There’s a legend about a simple monk who begged the Virgin Mary to let him see heaven, even if only for a moment. She granted him his wish and the good monk found himself in paradise. When he returned, he could not recognise the monastery. His prayer, which he thought was very short, lasted three centuries. Three centuries are nothing to a person in love.”
Eternity, then, means living with this God who is love and being filled with his love. In this world, falling in love may be the closest we come to the heavenly experience.
