to live an After Life

Is there life after Easter?

It is, I suppose, a question that is particularly concerning to preachers. The gist of the puzzle is the realization that, putting so much energy and attention and time into planning for one great day, for one special holiday, it is much too easy to forget to plan for whatever will come afterwards.

It happens to me every year. Somewhere along the path of Lent the idea will sneak into the edges of my consciousness that Easter will come and then there will be an “after Easter” in which I will need to be prepared to preach, teach, plan, and basically do life some more. Even though my whole focus is on one day, life begets the constant reminder of what comes next.

I wonder if basketball players have the same problem in the tournament season. Every game is win-or-go-home. But if you win, and of course you hope that you do, you have to turn in a matter of days or perhaps hours and play a game which you haven’t thought too much about, what with concentrating on winning the one at hand first.

And how do you do that?

It is something like a life question. Existence comes at us in a series of events, tests, victories, moments, crisis’, each demanding our full attention and desire. And after each one comes yet another and another and another for which, it often turns out, we are scarcely prepared.

We are always looking forward to an Easter of one kind or another. But will we be ready for what comes next?

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10

Faith, it turns out, is not so much as a destination as a launching. We search for the instance of belief, but it is to what follows that we are called. Grace is not a moment, an act, but a flow, a direction. Life is not a test, but an engagement in learning, growing, changing, an irresistible movement, towards, forward, yearning, stretching …

It is our nature to turn time into the finite, to seek an end of it, whether it be our own or someone else’s. This is the nature of our brokenness or perhaps the definition of all of it. That we even imagine a horizon, let alone seek its conquest, is the smallness of spirit that defies the God who made us. We are travelers, pilgrims, journeying along a creation, here for a time but then again here for much time, for pressing on time, for a next experience of time. We are not about things in the singular, we are born to the life eternal, not just for then but to bring its sense and meaning into now.

Abundant life means more than this life, it demands our constant faith and hope in after.

I should probably be getting ready for that.