THE DEEP ".....and darkness was upon the face of the deep with the Spirit of God brooding over it" Genesis 1:2 The scene that Henry David Thoreau painted in his 19th Century book Cape Cod would bring shivers to the boldest among us. A ship had wrecked just off shore after its occupants had spent weeks and months crossing the inhospitable ocean to reach America. The collective hope was for a better life. Thoreau had walked among the despondent weary people, ages old and young, who were silently dragging bodies ashore, combing for identities from belongings strewn along the beach, respectful and sorrowful, wondering which one might be a relative. It was cold and foggy, the mood of gloom all too familiar. The huge waves of the sea unrelenting; the Scripture tells us that the dead in Christ will be the very first ones zooming upward when God's saints are raptured in the precise instant that the trumpet blasts. This no small event will put the science fiction movies to shame when bodies fly up from even the most foreboding depths of the ocean. Up and up in a flash; a splash and a whoosh and swooped into a long awaited realm of bliss. Done. The great waters of the earth are holding more souls than we could count. There are markers from days gone by, set on hillsides not far from the ocean's grasp, declaring the demise of hundreds of souls lost at sea: thousands, countless millions. Another reminder of the brevity of our lives here on this planet, notwithstanding the less fortunate being tragically swallowed into volumes of icy water and sliding down fathoms into the dark and bottomless deep. The hours of our lives were ordered long before we came into being. How and when God calls us into the next dimension, into God's holy presence, is a mystery unrevealed. We won't know the details in this life, neither do we need to. What we do need is to live every day as if it were our last, lest we be caught unaware and unprepared. Soon enough God will reach down through the folds of time and lift us to our eternal balm. When the trump sounds, millions of souls will soar past us like lightening from the caverns of the deep right up to the heavens above. Zip - vacuumed into the funnel of eternity. We'd best be sure we're right on their tail. |
