The beauty of temporary

It’s amazing to me to think that angels look on humans and God’s dealings with them in wonder and awe. Angels. Perfect, eternal, awesome beings, who look at us temporal, imperfect, not awesome people, and marvel. Marvel at the plan of salvation created for us. We don’t know exactly when angels were created, but their very name tells us their purpose—messengers and servants of God. Humans were created as the culmination of God’s physical creation, and we were created for the purpose of having relationship with God, and through conformity to Him not only living our best lives, but also bringing glory to God. God made us not because he needed us, but because He desired relationship. A creation that would be like Him, could relate to Him, and would have the freedom to chose to move beyond situation, instinct, and background, to choose God. Man has a brief lifespan on this earth to find out who God is, why we need Him, and to choose what they will do with this knowledge. And therein lies the beauty of the temporary.

One of the tensions in life is our immortal soul is trapped in a mortal body, which gets to experience moral copies of the immortal perfection awaiting us…which means that we are going to live forever, but there are experiences that only we as humans can have, and only right now. We know how we live this life affects how our eternity will be, and I wonder if part of our enjoyment of heaven will be because of how much we enjoyed the flawed, temporary versions of God's creations in the hope of eternity.

Roses smell good and are beautiful for the days before they die and are replaced by other roses. In heaven there is no death, so if there are flowers in heaven (I hope so!), they won’t ever wither and die. There will not be the urgency to stop and enjoy this beautiful rose now. God is daily providing us with blessings that don’t last, and as they fade He is revealing yet others, and others, and others. While I am committed to living my life oriented towards an eternity with God, right here, right now, there are innumerable temporary blessings waiting for me to notice and appreciate them. Catching a rose in the full bloom of it’s beauty means something, because yesterday it wasn’t ready and tomorrow it will be fading. I will be this age for only so long—what went before lead up to it, and what comes next is part of it.

What a shame it would be to get to heaven and realize that we missed the vast majority of God’s freely lavished gifts to us, because we were too busy to enjoy the temporary. All those sunsets God painted for us to look at or not. All those springs which will mature into summer, wither into autumn, and die into winter. All those birds which live so briefly, all those flowers that bloom and fade in constant proclamation of the provision and goodness of God.

This life is temporary, this season is temporary, and every day there are gifts and mercies of God coming through the sin scared reality of our world and reminding us to rejoice. Those flowers won’t last more than a flash in the grand scheme of time and history, but taking the time to savor God's goodness demonstrated through them right now, today? I think that is gift worth celebrating.

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