Happy Groundhog’s Day! The people of Punxsutawney were out too early this morning but heh! An excuse to get together and party. I can never remember what happens with the groundhog’s shadow, more winter or less? It doesn’t matter. A yearly ritual to enjoy, but recall Bill Murray?
Think about your daily rituals. Times when you talk with someone dear. Regular times to go out to eat. Super Bowl, an excuse to party? Little things too. We’ll miss our rituals when they’re gone, but we won’t miss other things of daily life. It’s in daily time that we experience our troubles. It’s in this body we experience health issues and decline. It’s in these times that we feel too much the damage of sin.
Too many people, Christians too, live only in present time. “Carpe diem” said the Roman poet Horace, “Seize the day.” Ancient Greeks and Romans believed their eternity would be disembodied spirits, nothing to look forward to. The Creator “put eternity in man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but we can go through our daily routines without looking forward to eternity. Groundhog Day over and over again.
What I’m getting at is how to look towards death. When a pastor receives a call to another congregation, the rule of thumb is, don’t take the call to get away from your present situation but accept it because you whole-heartedly want to go. There is so much good in this life that death will take away; how can we become even more eager for the life to come? That sense of eternity that God put in our hearts needs to be identified, meditated upon, nurtured. That’s why you put yourself into the Bible, to look forward to the life to come.
This Groundhog Day, we’re having a winter storm in southern Illinois, rain, sleet, and now snow is falling. I’m told there will be no wintry storms in heaven. “So do Thou guide and govern us, that every day whatsoever betide us, some gain to better things, some more blessed joy in higher things may be ours, that so we, though but weaklings, may yet, God-guided, go from strength to strength, until at last, delivered from that burden of the flesh, through which comes so much struggling, we may complete our pilgrimage in triumph and enter into the land of harmony and eternal peace.” (George Dawson)
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