Pain Sharpens Our Eternal Perspective

This week in class we were discussing how pain can actually help us gain and maintain a better eternal perspective.

What is an eternal perspective?

It's is coming to the realization that living for the "here and now" is just one tiny fraction of our journey. It is realizing that what we are facing in this moment may feel like it will never end, but from an eternal perspective, it's very temporary and short lived.

It is really difficult to gain and understanding of eternity.

Remember when you were a kid? Remember how it seemed like forever from the time school started until Christmas. The days would crawl? The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed like they would never end.

Now, as an adult, I'm starting to panic about Christmas because it's the end of October and I haven't begun to prepare. Time is flying faster and faster. Every year seems to go more quickly as I get older. That gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Zoom!

Why is that?

In my opinion, it's all relative. When we are younger, experiencing the passing of a year is perceived as a long time. For a five year old, one year is one fifth of one's life. So it seems really long. As a 38 year old, one year is 1/38th of my life. That's a lot smaller fraction and when stacked up against all my other years, it seems to go faster (based on my experience and perception). When I'm 65, a year will be 1/65th of my life...and so on and so on.

Compare that to eternity. When we've been there 10,000 years, even 10 years of pain and suffering will only seem like (10,000 divided by 10) 1/1000th of our life. Just a very short time.

Does that make sense? To restate my earlier point: what we are facing in this moment may feel like it will never end, but from an eternal perspective, it's very temporary and short lived.

Experiencing pain allows us to develop a keener sense of eternity. For me, it is stirs hope to know that the vast majority of my existence (eternally) will not be spent in pain and suffering, because Jesus is my Savior.

If we were to only experience pleasure, who would want to think about tomorrow. Pleasure blurs our eternal perspective and prevents us from keenly appreciating the eternal promises of glory in Heaven with our Savior.

It's easy, when experiencing pain and suffering to argue that we deserve better than this. But it is important to realize that God can use this current pain to shape and form us into the image of Christ, into the people He needs us to be to build his kingdom.

I like the quote from our book this week: “God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.”

He'll recognize us by our scars. Someday they will reap a harvest of righteousness for us in Heaven.