Eternity
There are stars in the sky, beyond count or reckoning;
And myriad worlds, mysterious and beckoning,
Spreading out, racing round, with rushing insistence
And dwarfing all our tiny existence.
Yet in this immensity where gravity has flung us,
God’s drawn us close and he is among us.
Through ages of aching; lifetimes of longing;
This current that’s taking, joining, enthronging.
And wistfully yearning to end where it starts;
From trickle to torrent, eternity here in our hearts.
There are lives in the cosmos, spinning in motion,
That rise and ebb like tides in the ocean;
Like the dust all a-dance in shafts of a sunbeam,
Like boats that are borne along on the stream.
But out of infinity, though we are only two,
In his great mercy God put me with you.
There are eons of time, and epochs and stages
Like sand through the glass, that pours out the ages;
But the Lord everlasting – final and prime –
Has stepped in this stream, has waded in time.
And in this eternity, out of this forever
He will be with us, and we’ll be together.
Comment:
A striking thing I have observed in my patients is their hunger for life. See my blog entitled “Eternity in Our Hearts.” Several times an elderly patient has said something like “I don’t think I want to live beyond such and such an age” – only to revise this wish when they have actually attained to those years. It seems to be a rolling number, a moving target, and they rarely actually reach the point where they are truly ready to let go, even for the Christians who know God and look forward to meeting Him. The thing that drives that constant revision is something that is written deeply in our DNA: the desire to live.
In this song I have tried to infuse a sense of the wistfulness of living life. All of creation feels the same longing that we do – from the miniscule bacteria to the gargantuan super-clusters of galaxies. “For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God…for we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” (Romans 8:19,22).
Though the Bible does not show us the full culmination of all this longing, this actual birth itself, until the book of Revelation, we get beautiful little glimpses of what it will look like. I chose as the framework for this song a series of those little pictures taken from the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings.
There are three physical quantities: space, number, and time; three English words that try to convey the staggering scale of creation : “immensity,” “infinity,” and “eternity.” And most importantly to me, there are the three central metaphors from the book of Genesis, which God uses to convey the scope of blessings that He is giving to all the world through the patriarch, Abraham: “stars,” “dust,” and “sand.”
This is a love song to the wonder of creation and to the more wondrous Creator – the Lord Everlasting, final and prime. In him, our lives truly do have an eternal significance beyond the tiny space and fleeting time that we will take up during our days under the sun. We long for and truly we were made for eternity with him.