HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Revelation 21:4 “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

One of my earliest movie memories was the 1978 version of Superman. The storyline and special effects aren’t as impressive now as they were then, but I was just a child. I remember one scene in particular. Lois Lane was driving through the desert when her car is swallowed by an earthquake and Superman can’t get there in time to save her. Superman gets super angry and he starts flying around the earth at supersonic speed and he reverses time by reversing the rotation of the earth thus saving Lois.

Don’t you wish you could do that? I know that isn’t based on very good science. For one thing, the earth rotates around its axis at about 1,000 mph so if Superman had done what he did he would have saved Lois but the entire planet would have died from whiplash. But it’s a cool concept.

Wouldn’t it be great if you were having a conversation with someone and you said something you wish you hadn’t said and you could simply excuse yourself from the conversation, fly around the earth a few times, and pick up before you left off? Of course, the real danger then would be mid-air collisions because we’d all be flying around the earth all the time. I wish I could reverse time but the arrow of time points in one direction. You can’t undo what you’ve done. In other words, some things in life are irreversible.

When I was a freshman in high school, I blew out my elbow in the last game of our baseball season. I went to the doctor for a diagnosis and he said I tore my radial collateral ligament. I asked him how long it’d take to heal. He said, “Never.” I’ll never forget the feeling of finality—the damage was done and there was nothing I could do to change it. I learned a lesson the hard way that day: some things in life are irreversible. You can’t untear a ligament. For what it’s worth, I’ve also learned from personal experience that you can’t undelete documents, unbake cookies, uncut hair or unrun red lights with surveillance cameras. Some things in life are irreversible. But here’s some good news: God is in the business of reversing the irreversible.

If you read the gospels you’ll discover that Jesus reversed weather patterns. He reversed blindness. He reversed paralysis. And 2,000 years ago, He reversed death. I love the way Acts 2:24 says it. “But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” I love that language. We tend to think of dying and coming back to life as being impossible. Peter says the exact opposite. It was impossible for death to keep its grip on Christ.

Our scripture paints a picture of how I believe God wanted things to be from the beginning. God, living in holy communion with creation, free from hurt, pain, disappointment, sickness, loss, etc. Life may be difficult at times. We all have felt the effects of a problematic world. But one day, God will reverse the ill impacts of our fleshly existence. In the end, he will bring his people to a glorious place, safe with him. Now that’s a happy ending.