Have you ever thought about how short our time is, and has been, on this earth? The earth has existed long before us and will (barring something cataclysmic) exist long after we are gone.
This is the stuff of Lent but it is also the stuff of God who has been the Alpha and Omega…our beginning and our end. We need to know that even though our time here is only a blink on eternity’s continuum it is also just a shadow of God’s love for us–which goes well beyond our graves to a sharing of God’s eternal reward for us.
At a funeral I once attended, the homilist asked “How many of us can remember our great-great grandparents?” Nobody could, of course, mention anything because they had not experienced a first-hand connection with them. The truth is that this will one day be spoken of us by those who come after us–and we know not those who will come well ahead of our time and those who went before us had no knowledge of us either.
And none of that matters.
Why? Because God can make all things new again. When we are united with God we are united with all the world for all eternity. When we turn to God we get in touch with ourselves and we allow God to change us into better people. Our own biases and shortcomings and indiscretions are not all that we are and we have a God who helps us get past all that. When everyone loses hope in us, we
God can change it all around and he cares for us for all time…
Even when everyone else has forgotten us.