Today I just received the news of a church friend whose wife and two grandchildren perished in a horrific accident. They were in their car waiting at a construction site on an interstate. A truck barreled into them, their car burst in the flames, and suddenly eternity was meeting three out of five. Just last week a Gospel band lost most of its members in a plane crash in Wyoming while on their way to meet the Gaithers band and set sail on an Alaskan cruise.
Such tragedies make me think of the tragedy I wrote about in the book When the Avalanche Roared. The passengers and crews went to sleep that night in the sleeper cars, expecting deliverance to come the following morning when the train would move on to its destination of Seattle. Inexplicably, in the middle of the night, a wall of snow swept the train off the track and most of them perished.
It is difficult to understand God‘s reasoning in tragedies like these. But it makes one realize that eternity can meet at any time, anywhere, at any place. And in ways that we cannot avoid. We could be doing the simplest of things in life and have it meet us. God knows our times. They’ve all been written in His book for us. We need to live out each day expecting that it could be our last.
So if you haven’t said you love somebody, do it. If you haven’t accomplished that task and you still have another day to do it on this earth, do it. We don’t know the times and the seasons, and we don’t know when the end will come and we meet eternity. But rest assured, if Jesus is your savior, eternity with Him is beautiful and perfect even if this life is beset with tragedy and sorrow. The old will pass away.
And He will wipe every tear from our eyes. Revelation 21:4