As the light gets dim and the days grow short, the Scripture turns to the end of days. Daniel speaks of the end of the world as we know it, when the righteous will be separated from those who do not love God. And Jesus answers questions from his disciples about the end of time. They want to know when it will happen, and how can they guess the date.
We human being always want to guess the date. The Mayan calendar has us all hyped up these days. The new date is Dec 21 or 23 of 2012. Nothing much has changed. We too, like the disciples, want to know when we will end.
Jesus does not give the disciples a direct answer. Instead, he talks about wars, famine and earthquakes. "But these," Jesus says, "Are just the beginning of the birth pangs."
The birth pangs. It sounds like he was talking about a beginning, not an end.
Think about birth with me for a moment. All of us were content in a warm, dark world. Our every need was provided for. We did not ask for change or disruption. Probably if anyone could have communicated with us, they would have found out that we liked our little warm existence just the way it was, thank you very much. Life was pretty good in our mothers bellies, pretty comfortable, probably beautiful and gentle. Why would we have ever wanted to leave?
But then, out of nowhere, our world began to collapse. No one consulted us. We could not have predicted the date or the event for that matter, it was all beyond our fathoming. The warmness went away, there was constriction and pain. We might have thought we were dying, if we could have known what it was to die. And then there was cold and light and noise and chaos. Shapes that we could not distinguish. There was feeling and sight and sounds and light. We were born.
What we once thought was pain and death ended up being life itself.
So who is to say the the "end" of this world will not be a beginning, the beginning of something infinately greater? Something that we cannot even begin to imagine? Isn't that God's way, the way of this incredible creation?
In fact, wasn't Jesus trying to tell us just that, that we are waiting to be born? What we do not realize is that we are not yet fully alive. This life is what C.S. Lewis called The Shadowlands. We are not yet fully awake. We run around with our constant business, like tiny ants on the surface of this planet. We are not fully aware of what it is to be alive in God. There is more to come. Somewhere deep down inside, don't you believe that?
At the end, there will be birth pangs. And we will be born in God.
