“Agony”

 

Adolescence is described best by the two words agony and torment.

Adolescence is a stage in life where you no longer are a child but you’re not an adult either. It is a station of life where you lack identity and it’s frustrating to see your voice changing and your beard growing but not fast enough to catch up with Eve next door. Your voice gets deeper but your body is lagging behind in your quest for adulthood.

 

Adolescence is also the “sophomore” stage of life where a young man becomes a “Wise fool.” Someone recommended hiring a sophomore while he has all the answers before he is ruined by old age and knows better. 

 

Sophomore is not a happy stage of life. Fortunately, it passes fast but when adulthood arrives you will wish you were younger knowing what you know now.

 

Thank God that growing up is an irreversible process designed by God to help us long for the unchanging heaven and despise everything earthly as you realize how they grow strangely dim at the light of the knowledge of Jesus the son of God, and God himself in the flesh which is the glorious gospel of Jesus.

 

In the same way agony is a stage in life where you’re not dead but you are not healthy either. It seems to be constantly dying but never really dead. Alive but without life. Always remembering that aLive is a person and that is Jesus in you, the hope of Glory.

 

Again, we see the wonderful wisdom of God our father who designed life in such a way that you don’t get to attached to life on earth or to attached to the visible or to attached to the temporal because they are doomed to pass but only what’s done for Christ will last.

Just like the resurrected Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary are no longer with us, so we who are alive now will not be here on this planet in less than one hundred years. The visible world is doomed to pass away but the Spiritual and the invisible are here to stay and stay forever.  The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.

 

 

Let’s together long for the life yet to come, the new life, the life that begins on earth and goes on in a life of never-ending fellowship of reconciliation with God and with one another. This fellowship established by God in Jesus is manifested in the splurging of the inheritance of the saints, which is their fellowship on earth as a preview of what is yet to come.

 

Recommended reading: No passage in scripture is more adequate to have a peek of the life yet to come as the following passage. 

 

The Rich Man and Lazarus

 

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

 

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ 

 

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them. ’‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

 

I love the picture of being in the bosom of Abraham in his “Finishing school.” The last touch up by the Father of our faith at the end of the assembly line before I see our beautiful Jesus. 

 

Gerry Gutierrez.

 

Picture is Nathaniel and breakfast in bed after the second surgery of my hand. My

Fistula will be operational next week. Thank you for your powerful and faithful prayers.