Touching eternity

A time to jump and a time to stand still

A few weeks ago I was stuck in an airport, delayed, and decided to pray for some things.

You should be careful when you ask for things.

Oftentimes you will get them.

Delays have become my favorite time to pester God. I’m stuck. Nobody’s going anywhere. And He knew about it beforehand so He’s probably got the time to talk — so I try to use them wisely… unexpected alone time with heaven.

I got up from my gate and started walking around and asked, “Hey… can you show me what you feel? I want to feel it.”

He answered my request immediately and it broke me immediately (if you saw me walking around the Nashville airport crying, it’s all okay - I am good lol).

First, I wasn’t expecting an answer that quickly. Second, I wasn’t prepared for what I would do when I felt it.

I saw men and women and children eating food and walking around and rushing and talking… and I felt pain. Immense pain.

Not sharp or physical - but a sense of existential crisis - the kind you only feel when you love somebody deeply and they do something that hurts…

I felt the overwhelming futility of chasing what wasn’t worth chasing.

Waste.

And confusion.

The heaviness of trying to achieve something that wouldn’t make a difference one way or another after it was achieved… IF it was achieved.

I saw time stretched out like a line and the human race, one by one, tightroping it in the middle, building their own version of “success” and “happiness” that would never last but the only thing they knew how to do was to try. People kept falling off, but others kept trying.

Like Solomon, I saw that we can build, and we can tear down, and we can leave a mark on our timelines that everyone will forget about when we are gone. Everything was a waste.

It felt oppressive and exhausting.

I asked God, “Is this you? Why is this the way you feel?”

God was showing me what it felt like to be on the other side of it: willing and able to offer us what we’ve always wanted and needed, but rarely asked to do so.

But knowing this, it didn’t make it any better…

There was no tension, only loss. Heartbreak. Sadness. And compassion. A sense that things COULD be better, but they weren’t… not yet.

By the time I got on my flight and landed in NYC, I felt like literally nothing mattered.

I prayed to reverse it.

I didn’t want to feel it anymore…

Underneath the pain was a deep sense of love for people but even the love was painful and made me sad.

It was a 100% certainty, all the way through my body, that I *knew* we were capable of so much more, but because we loved chasing cars and barking at them like dogs, God was letting us chase and bark while He watched.

We have drifted so far beneath our station.

God is kind and does not force us to accept our greatness when we only want to make it to the next month (or year, or decade) without a fuss.

“ETERNITY (ʿolam) IS IN THE HEARTS OF MAN.”

Like looking at the horizon, and KNOWING there is something beyond it, we crave to GO there but don’t know how. Our awareness of eternity is always ebbing and flowing, but sometimes we can reach out and TOUCH it and understand it, and other times we can’t.

There are two parts existing in us, one that remembers and one that doesn’t.

I felt the delta between the two parts… between what we busy ourselves with and dabble in… and what we’re called to and designed for.

And I knew that until we find something that lasts, we will waste out lives shouting in the wind, trying to outrun our own insignificance.

We can’t get rid of this wiring — the intuitive pull towards the expansive, the infinite… it creates a “restlessness” in us that can only be medicated, sometimes, but never fully satiated until we find the cure.

We were created to commune with the world maker… we can integrate into and SPEAK fluently with the Mind that powers the cosmos and everything inside of it.

But instead, we distract ourselves.

We build our stadiums and gadgets and put our plans together - plans we are so proud of - but that pale in comparison to our original programming… we fabricate movements that always seem to go sideways because we cannot power them for long enough by ourselves.

Until you meet with and walk in eternity… it will all be meaningless.

I came out of it in NYC and God told me to ask for different things, which I didn’t want to do. The last prayer was a headache and a half, - but I did (eventually).

And then God said this: “You want to know why there is revival happening in the business community? The arts and entertainment? Want to know why I’m raising them up?”

YES.

“Because, these people, they are uniquely aware of the futility of their own empires.”

We have tried it.

And we have SUCCEEDED at it.

And tasted it.

And it tasted good for a moment, before it turned to ash.

The next morning, I got a coffee and wrote this down: “I am tired of building things that I would not die for.”

I’ve spent a long enough portion of my life building and scaling and crafting things I wouldn’t ever die for.

It is not enough to just “make more money.”

It is not enough to get famous.

I would never die for those things.

There is an electricity being turned on around the world and people are beginning to feel it for the first time. And they don’t want to go back to meaningless. But there is a sacrifice for this trade…

To trade the temporal for the eternal.

The things you say and the moves you make start to look and sound ridiculous.

People will think you are crazy…

Then, like a sudden shift in temperature, everyone will feel it. They will begin to ask “What is happening over there? What happened to so and so?”

But even this is a sacrifice.

Your power source has been unplugged from one reality and into another one… and you’ll know that you will never really “fit in” again. You will become a stranger to your own time - like Abraham in Genesis 23:4 when he said, “I am a stranger and a sojourner among you.”

It’s scary.

…To take the leap and let it go and let it happen.

To decide to shoot for something so big you don’t know if you will be alive or dead by the time it is accomplished.

But this is the thing that powers movements.

For some of you, it’s time to let your dreams go, for good… because they do not match your program anymore.

For others, it’s time to pick your dreams back up again, many years later — because you are finally ready to hold them. And it is time to power them again.

Both will feel like a sacrifice, and both of them are.

We must label the sacrifice correctly as the price you are willing to pay to touch eternity.

God is with you.

And He is for you.

But it will always cost you and it will always cost me.

So long as the cost is worth it, our highest level of fulfillment in life will be to wake up and to pay it.

No more wavering.