Yet to Be Revealed

Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.
-1 Peter 1:13

I've been thinking some this morning on what is to lie ahead for us. The one common thought that pervaded the lives of all of the saints you read of is the present and immediate hope of life to come. This hope drew them deeper into the life of and with God like an arrow taught on a bow's string. And it wasn't just hope - my gosh, that's found in a million different places... hope for health promised by medicines and physicians and diets, hope for prosperity found in careers and investments, hope for a stable family life promised by church programs and institutions - but rather an abandoned trust that life is about to explode for them, and they were about to be released fully into it.

We must rouse our senses and ask God for the courage to throw ourselves, too, into that same hope. Can you imagine what it will be like? Think on the greatest moment you've experienced over this last month - a great conversation with friends, perhaps, or a really special or intimate time with someone you love and someone who loves you, or a time when you were just lost in doing something you really love to do and forgot the time. Remember the joy you felt, the abandon, the sense that all was right in your world, that pleasure. Or, think on those times over the last month when you haven't had these, but wanted them. How do you know that you should have them, except that you were made for them? These are echoes, these times, given us to draw us further into that life. They are only shadows for what is to come, hints of that life that is coming to us.

It is coming, and quicker than most of us dare to hope.

When it's all said and done, I'll stand before the Living God and He'll ask me, "Did we know each other?" When that's asked of me, I want there to be a glean in His eye, and a widening grin come across his face before we both burst out laughing, He runs to me and knocks me down with a tackle-hug, looks me square into my eyes with that soul-piercing, all-knowing, all-loving intensity of His, and says (barely, before He starts laughing again so hard He can hardly get it out), "Welcome Home, my dear friend. Welcome Home! Come, enter into the joy of the Kingdom with us."

And then life, real and full, will begin...