Impermanence. It bothers me that things don’t last. Objects break and wear down. Our bodies die and families stress over where and how to bury us. While we live, our bodies must always have a place. A home. A family. Friends. Work. We move. Families break up. Friends betray or move away and lose touch. We lose our jobs, businesses, and homes. Homelessness is a raging plague. Life changes caused by impermanence cause stress. Chronic stress can cause illness. But, faith in Christ is a “Balm in Gilead” that can keep your life together when things are falling apart.
Impermanence, Chronic Stress, & Sickness
Displacement and failure to adjust causes chronic stress, which is often the harbinger of the fractured soul and body. According to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress adversely affects your body’s health. The National Institute of Mental Health says that chronic stress such as those related to family, work, and daily responsibilities, can cause diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, anxiety, and other dis-eases. The careful cultivation of faith in your life as a true Christian grants cohesion to your life and health that would otherwise fall apart under the multiple stresses of impermanence.
Faith Isn’t Fatalism or Denial
Impermanence is a way of life.
For me, displacement is one of the worse feelings. As much as I don’t like it, I manage to endure the winds of change while looking forward to a time when Jesus returns to gather the living and the dead to live forever with Him in our eternal home. This is not a fatalistic denial of physical reality, but rather, an acknowledgement and joy in knowing that God knows that we live in a fallen world which causes impermanence: So, He did something about it. He made a way to redeem His children from this curse. He prepared a place for us in Heaven.
I’m excited that Jesus will come for us, and that He will arrive with fanfare worthy of the King of Kings and Lords of Lords. With the fanfare of Heavenly trumpets that pierce the air and shake the Earth with their sound, bodies and spirits are swept up into the air, into the air, into the air, until we reach our eternal home with Christ.
We will be taken to a place where we will forever delight in the eternal newness of life, in a place where there is no night. Where displacement has no place. Now that, is living. That is joy. That. Is. life!
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 NIV
Until next time: Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might!
Your friend in Christ,
Verneda
