I love to run. I love the sharp pain in the lungs and the burn of muscles. But when my body starts to struggle, the worst thing I can do is watch my feet. I need to pick a point on the horizon and run towards it. My strides become longer and my body complains less. I usually pick something I can see, like a tree or mailbox or a goat.
I find that throughout life I have often done the same thing. When I was ten, the promise of pizza would excite my expectations and longings from a week away. When I was fifteen, I would count down the days till my birthday or summer. As I grew older I would look forward to trips to Montana, Crowder concerts, or graduation parties. I was trying to get rid of all the days between so I could just get down to the important stuff, like the holy grail of Christmas morning.
As humans I think we have a tendency to count down the days. The disease of senioritis strikes more than just students. We act as if marriage or a career move or the start date of the next school is when life will really start.
In reality, these events lack the payoff we imagine. People get the dream job, dream spouse, dream car, and end up still searching for the next thing. At no point in this life will we feel we have arrived. Instead, we are told to set our minds on things above and not on things of earth (Col 3:2). This isn’t an excuse not to pay your landlord, it’s a call to remember what we are really running towards.
When I go camping, my heart is there long before my body. I may be at work mowing lawns, but in my head I am going through a mental checklist of parachord, white kerosene, headlamps, and Ramen. Setting my heart on heaven doesn’t mean I check out of this present life. Instead, I look at my day to day activities through the lens of eternity. In many ways, I am more effective because my hope is not set on these flimsy events of my present life.
If you have your heart set on an earthly deadline, lift your eyes to eternity. Everything else is just icing on the cake. Mission trips aren’t the cake, heaven is the cake. Writing a best selling book isn’t the cake. Getting your song on the radio isn’t the cake. Launching for the World Race isn’t the cake. It’s all just frosting, and if you have a cake made entirely out of frosting it will be sad and saggy and give you a gut ache.
Heaven is the cake.
