Eternity:

We ourselves groan.

(Romans 8:23)

Funny how though we can speak of God’s mercy in Gary’s death—though we rejoice in Easter Morning and life everlasting; we still groan. Or, maybe I should speak for myself, or ourselves—our household. We keep moping around, and bemoaning how it can be that Gary is no longer with us. Even with Alzheimer’s, there was something about him still being there even when he wasn’t all there.

Gary was 73 years old when he “breathed his last.” Abraham was 175. Doesn’t seem fair. Those Patriarchs got an extra hundred years or so on us. The Psalmist laments that God has set our mortality clock back:

The length of our days is seventy years,

      maybe eighty, if we have the strength;

We finish our years with a moan.

      our days quickly pass… (Ps 90:9-10).

So it is to this day. Our life expectancy has been whittled down to our 70s or 80s. As things go, Gary did all right. He got his three-score and ten plus a few. He out lived King David who died at 70. Yet, we sorrow—too young.

Death always comes too soon. We were hoping for more days on God’s beautiful green earth—days to take a few more leisurely drives together on Eastside road winding our way through the vineyards. “God has placed eternity into our hearts,” observes King Solomon; “yet so,” he goes on, “we cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecc 3). That’s our predicament. We long for eternity; yet, we, of ourselves, can’t get there. Only the One who “placed eternity into our hearts,” can get us to eternity. We need, as our Lord says, “someone greater than Solomon” to get us to life everlasting.