Living in Tents

 

A friend died this week.  A fighter.  She inspired everyone she met with the fierce tenacity of her fight and she gave me personal encouragement in my own tiff with cancer.  As her body grew weaker and began to wear out, her spirit seemed to bench press, growing stronger.  She taught me that you can still fight with your body while relinquishing your mind and spirit completely to God.

In this grand scheme called life, I believe our bodies are just tents. Temporary dwellings in which our souls live for a season.  When the tent can no longer be repaired, the soul moves on.  It sounds so simple and maybe a little too virtuous.  The truth is, we’re pretty attached to our tents.  We don’t like it when they hurt and malfunction.  It stinks when they can’t do what we want to do and go where we want to go.  It seems especially unfair when they wear out long before we’re finished camping.  David must have felt this way when he cried out to the Lord in his 102^nd Psalm.

He has broken my strength in midcourse; He has shortened my days.  “O my God,” I say, “take me not away in the midst of my days – You whose years endure throughout all generations!”  Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.  They will perish, but you will remain; they will wear out like a garment.  You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end.  Psalm 102:23-27 (ESV)

The one who manufactured my tent made everything else too and only He has the power to say when I’m finished on this earth.  My tent shows up as a tiny speck on His infinite timeline.  But He saw me long before the speck appeared.  Psalm 139:16 (ESV) says:  Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. 

Someday after my speck of a tent disappears, I will live on with Him.  Jesus told Martha after her brother, Lazarus, had died, “I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”  Yes, Lord, I do believe this.  With everything in me, I believe it.  I am an eternal being, beyond this temporal flesh I wear.  Knowing that gives me the same eternal perspective that my friend had.  And watching her bulldog spirit has taught me it’s ok to keep fighting for this tent until He says He’s finished with it.