Life can get overwhelming.
Like a weight on your back digging deep into your shoulders, it can crush and oppress and take the joy from you until all you think about is the weight.
Life can be heavy. Even when it is good.
Because even good things can be overwhelming.
Parenting. Wedding planning. Moving. Training.
Learning. Working. Socializing. Growing.
Sometimes we can become so busy and surrounded with events and plans and ideas and goals that we can no longer see what truly matters.
The pressures and pursuits of our daily lives takes our eyes off Jesus and the place he is preparing for us.
We become blind to eternity when we’re only focused on the present.
Don’t believe me?
Take a look at the ground. Could you still see the sky when all you were focusing on was the ground?
In the same way, when our heads and hearts are buried in the distractions of this world, it’s hard to still see the hope of heaven.
Randy Alcorn once said,
“Life on Earth is a dot, a brief window of opportunity; life in Heaven (and ultimately on the New Earth) is a line going out from that dot for eternity. If we’re smart, we’ll live not for the dot but for the line.”
I want to live for the line.
And as the days grow darker and more evil, I yearn for it more and more.
I yearn, as 2 Corinthians 4:18 instructs, to “fix my eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
This earth is not all there is. One day our burdens will fall at Jesus’ feet and when our eyes meet his we’ll wonder why we spent so much time with our gaze fixed on the temporary treasures and trials of our short lives here in what C.S. Lewis calls the shadowlands.
We have an eternal hope. We have an ultimate home waiting for us. This life is not all there is, and yet, it still matters because it’s the beginning of a life that will continue without end.
Wherever you’re at when you’re reading this, however you feel, whether overwhelmed with grief, joy, exhaustion or excitement, stop focusing on the dot that is this life.
As the old hymn says, “turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face- and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”
Make it your aim to live for the line.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily entangles, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” -Hebrews 12:1-2