My mother used to call them “temporary arrangements.” These were the “honey-do” projects she wanted Dad to tackle, and they were never done to her satisfaction. She always longed for a new house with a new kitchen, enough storage, and something less ravaged by four kids and a dog.
That’s what I thought about when I read 2nd Corinthians: 4:18 this morning. That and the war in Ukraine, and the administration which is undermining, in my opinion, democracy and even some sense of sanity announced in every fifteen minute block on cable news. But, I am not attempting to become politically involved at this moment. I’m likely to get called out by the Facebook police again. At least they apologized one of the two times I was orange-triangled last week.
Paul’s verse reads: “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
This could be a verse that means don’t fret over little things, or “God’s got this!” or other trite answers to daily peeves and troubles. But I think Paul is right that too often our faith is too small to see beyond what is right before us and put it into the perspective I like to call the five-year plan. In the sight of eternity, that too is temorary.
What do I mean by my five-year plan? You may have heard me quote myself before. When I turned sixty, I thought of two things. One, a poem that says “when I turn sixty, I can wear purple,” meaning that milestone meant I could stop thinking about pleasing other people and do what I pleased, in reason, of course. My conservative bent prevents me from dying my hair purple, for instance.
The other statement I adopted as one of my life principles was: “If it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter in five minutes.” That gives me permission to not get annoyed by the little things until they get to be major things. It means I can cut me some slack. It means I give myself permission to allow some deadlines pass without getting anxious that I’m a failure, or it means I can choose which battles to fight, because in the long run, once the dust settles, the issue vanishes under the next boatload of “stuff” that gets dumped in my lap.
Recognize that I was still teaching, I was planning retirement moving, I had far more responsibilities than I wanted, and that I was recognizing that getting older meant I had to change my attitude from being all things to all people to a modicum of making wise choices.
Whatever other applications are inherent in this verse, I hope you find them today. And if you care, tomorrow is Shakespeare’s birthday and death date. I wonder if he wondered, in all his genius of looking at life uniquely, that the eternal was far more important than “As You Like It,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the shenanigans of Falstaff and Puck. Just wondering.
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