Dreams of Glory

I have had the unusual experience this year of being around when the Olympics (Winter, in this case) are occurring but (due to having no cable) have not seen them.

It is an odd experience, sitting down in the morning and evening and being bombarded electronically with pictures and personal stories and medal counts for something that you have no idea of, are not really following, and in which you do not have a great deal of interest. For example, this morning I opened up my e-mail and noticed that a young female snowboarder (US, I'm guessing) is pictured along with caption "Denied a medal four years ago due to a gaffe, she may be denied again".

Then it hit me, as the screen disappeared as I moved to my e-mail inbox, that this is exactly the same as our entire life here in comparison to eternity. We become caught up in our lives, our plans, our goals, thinking that they are the most important thing going on in the universe and that surely (if we were able to ask Him) God would see it that way too. Any bumps or errors we make along the way are surely justifiable and well understood.

What we fail so often to realize is that eternity is simply that: eternal. It is (in a very broken analogical way) the same as the Olympics: our lives are the two weeks the Olympics occur, eternity is the 3 years and 50 weeks when they are not occurring.

The Olympics will fade; at best the medals will appear on a wall or fireplace, the records kept until broken, the roar of the crowd quickly fading. Likewise for us Life is too quickly spent, the items we worked for all our lives fading to gray, the people around us forced to leave us as we travel on. Are our Dreams of Glory placed towards that which is truly lasting, or on a brief span of time that quickly disappears?