Sunday, July 10, 2011

Let's do the fork in the garbage disposal!

About ten years ago, the teacher asked her class to write answers to the question: If you could live forever, would you?
I knew my answer immediately: no. I thought that any eternal existence would become really boring, and that eventually, I would seek nothingness: death. Of course, at this moment I was quite content with life and would not have backed up this prediction absolutely. But I also thought it was preposterous to exist forever.
For days after this, our teacher read us Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit. This is still one of my favorite books. It is about a family who finds a spring that gives eternal life. A girl falls in love with one of the family's sons, chooses not to drink the spring's water, and dies at a healthy, normal age. This book asserted the warning against holding onto an earthly life so strongly that many kids changed their minds afterwards.

In retrospect, I think I was wrong. Yes, I do not want to live forever. But yes, it would be nice to live forever. If Heaven is real, then wouldn't it be wonderful to live forever? It might be boring, or it might not. But my mind is so limited; I am far from wise. I do not have enough mental capacity or any capacity to conclude that an eternal Heaven would be boring.
I love life and am so excited about it. At the same time, I resolve not live on Earth forever. No worries about that; we know what will happen here.
But the other sort of eternality, in Heaven or Hell... I cannot deny that this will happen.

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. from Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.

2 comments:

Shao said...

Know what's even crazier? God's eternal life is already in us, working and transforming us. :)

David T said...

I remember Tuck Everlasting and how I didn't want to live forever either after reading that book! You bring up good points that I've thought about myself about eternal life. Previously I thought it would be boring living forever, but I'm sure living with Jesus forever will be pretty sweet!