[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, neither will there be any more sorrow or crying or any more pain, because the former things have gone away. Rev 21:4. |
Will God wipe away tears by causing us to forget all the hardships, suffering, and pain of this life? Or will we remember the hurts clearly, yet they won’t “hurt” anymore? How far will the “former things” have gone away? I suspect we will still remember, but the pain will be gone. The memories of our personal history are worth retaining, they are part of what we have become. When memory has lost its power to wound, it retains its capacity to develop depth of character.
For those who have been severely wounded by life, it can be hard to imagine that time could strip painful events of their power to cause tears. But with God’s help it can happen. And sometimes the process doesn’t take long.
My youngest daughter and I staggered out of our beds at 1:30 in the morning. Recently baptized in the Red Sea, she had committed to a night climb of Mount Sinai. We set out with several others at about 2 AM, trailed by camel drivers certain we wouldn’t make it to the top without help. “Camel, good camel, very nice,” they mumbled to each of us every five minutes.
The darkness was deep, broken only by flashlights. As we dug the toes of our athletic shoes into the scrabbly, red soil of the mountain, occasional shooting stars flashed by behind us. The 7400-foot mountain became steeper and steeper as the path approached the great wall that signaled the last third of the climb. The camel drivers continued to follow, knowing some of us would soon succumb to muscular gridlock. Some did. My daughter forged determinedly on.
The steepest part of the climb is the legendary staircase to the top. 750 steps carved almost vertically out of the red rock. Rest stops became more and more frequent as bodies cried out for mercy. We made it! No camels! No donkeys! Just sore muscles.
By mid-morning my daughter and I returned to our hotel. She flopped face down on her bed and lay absolutely still for a moment. Then her head popped up and she said, “Remind me to NEVER, EVER, EVER, do anything like that again!” Her head dropped face-down into her pillow and I didn’t hear from her for several hours!
A few days later in Germany, a bright-eyed girl looked up eagerly at me, without warning, and said, “Dad, when can we climb Mount Sinai again?” I was taken by surprise, but I shouldn’t have been. The memory was fresh. The pain was gone. You could say that the “former things” had gone away, yet in another sense they had not. |
