We can't help admitting it. We throw those words around like pinballs in an overzealous machine.
This is the last time I'm going to tell you, young man!
This better be the last time I have to change these sheets tonight...
I hope this is the last time I have to take a math course...
He's been hospitalized three times this year; hopefully this is the last time for a while...
The last time, the last time, the last time... the last time we make that mistake, give into that temptation, sign up for dish duty on Friday night (I haven't committed that last one, but I'm not sure why it's so bad, either). My life is ridden with looking forward to these. I began to realize how much when the spring semester started winding down. The last clinical... the last journal... the last exam... the last skill sheet... the last two weeks were a continual checking off of a long list of Lasts. I realized it even more when the six-week summer courses started full-throttle the week right after finals, only this time it's more along the lines of: This is the Last Time I am ever taking a six-week course... ever. (No rest for the weary...)
If nothing else, my summer session has made me more sensitive to something about myself and the world around me. We live our lives with these falsified, contemporary ideals of how work and rest are balanced throughout the year. As students, summer is considered a ... 'break.' A rest. A time to relax and kick back and not go to school (work). Even the potentially monotonous grind of a summer job is comparatively relaxing to term papers and exams and ... well, the job only lasts for the summer, usually, so it's unrealistically fun anyway. Summer courses remind me that my summer is not sacred, just like working Fridays and Saturdays during the school year remind me that my weekend is not sacred. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work... I can't gripe about working six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year - whatever work that is. At the end of that week, I am an unworthy servant, having only done my duty (if that!) and desperately in need of some rest.
It pushes me forward. It pushes me to look to another Last Time. Not the end of merely this six-week stretch, or even the end of work itself, because I don't think work is a bad thing. But the idea of futile toil... of struggling hopelessly against something I can never effect... this is everything I do. This is everything fallen about work in this world. Every bed I change at the hospital is futility. Every person I comfort and care for is (looking at it pragmatically) futile. I can't make them all better. I want to keep them from dying, and I can't. They're going to die eventually. I can't stop that.
Take something even nearer and dearer to my heart than classes and work. My youngest brother is sitting in a hospital somewhere. His body is wasted and hurting and fighting and struggling - struggling so hard - against the natural current of death and sickness. We're all fighting it, and fighting it with the same futility; we just don't know it as well as Calvin does right now. I don't know if this current attack on his body will be the last severe one that I'll have to witness. I hope so - I dearly hope so! - but at the same time, I know that the struggle does not end with this recent illness. The moment his condition stabilizes and returns to the best kind of normal it can, he will still be with the rest of us: the heart, a ticking time-bomb, slowly counting down to the Last Time it beats...
Calvin needs the resurrection. My friend over in Britain, who just pounded an attack of cancer into the dust (God willing!), needs the resurrection. I need the resurrection. All of us, sick or healthy... we don't need some doctor or procedure to merely prolong death; we need death to die.
Tonight, I heard a song by Ben Shive, the main thrust of which was this: before Jesus comes back, somebody's going to die. Maybe a lot of people will die, but someone in particular will die. Just one person - maybe seconds, maybe moments, maybe hours before Jesus returns - one person will die, and then...
That will be the Last Time anyone dies. Ever.
Perhaps the most striking thought is that this won't be obvious or noticeable. God's not going to point out when it happens. Much will not be made over the minute death takes its last life. There will be no fanfare. The indignity of its exit is remarkable.
And like a bad dream,
unreal in the morning light,
so will the world seem
when you see it in the mirror for the last time.
'Cause there is a last time,
there's a last time for everything.
unreal in the morning light,
so will the world seem
when you see it in the mirror for the last time.
'Cause there is a last time,
there's a last time for everything.
we know that when he appears we shall be like him,
because we shall see him as he is.
-I John 3:2-
The lyrics quoted above which made these scattered thoughts semi-cohesive belong to Ben Shive. Do me a tremendous favor and go listen to the song: it's called 'A Last Time For Everything' and I've fallen in love with it about as much as anything Andrew Peterson has written/recorded. (Ben does write for Andrew, and he tours with him a good deal.) Maybe if enough people view it on youtube, he'll actually release it to an album...?
Lasts and "never again"s. Won't it be great when we have firsts with no ends?
I listened. You pulled a lot out of that :)
Jenny and I were talking about this yesterday, and she wanted me to post it for you. It reminded me of your exemplary attitude throughout all your family has been going through.
"Let your afflictions be what they will, there is not one of you, but has more mercies than afflictions.
Objection: You will say, Yes, but you do not know what our afflictions are; our afflictions are such as you do not conceive of, because you do not feel them.
Answer: Though I cannot know what your afflictions are, yet I know what your mercies are, and I know they are so great that I am sure there can be no afflictions in this world as great as the mercies you have."
(The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, Burroughs)
I have that highlighted in my copy. ^.^
Lasts and "never again"s. Won't it be great when we have firsts with no ends?
I listened. You pulled a lot out of that :)
Jenny and I were talking about this yesterday, and she wanted me to post it for you. It reminded me of your exemplary attitude throughout all your family has been going through.
"Let your afflictions be what they will, there is not one of you, but has more mercies than afflictions.
Objection: You will say, Yes, but you do not know what our afflictions are; our afflictions are such as you do not conceive of, because you do not feel them.
Answer: Though I cannot know what your afflictions are, yet I know what your mercies are, and I know they are so great that I am sure there can be no afflictions in this world as great as the mercies you have."
(The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, Burroughs)
I have that highlighted in my copy. ^.^
This is BEAUTIFUL. Sehnsucht? I can' really think of anything else to say. Just beautiful.