Consider the scope of it, what it might mean, what it surely must mean if it’s true. My mind can hardly fathom that. I half expect it to be like one of those short dreams I sometimes have just as I’m falling asleep. My whole body is overcome with the sensation of weightlessness and, all at once, for no more than a tenth of a second, I would swear that I was falling. And then, just as quickly as it started, it ends. I awake to find myself safely tucked under the covers of my own bed. That’s almost what I expect. As my mind focuses on the truth of it that same impression consumes my being, only it doesn’t stop after a second or even a minute. It goes on into infinity—as long as I dare to think about it.
When I was young I can remember sometimes trying to understand the concept of eternity. I would imagine a road that simply never ended. Over hills and mountains, past streams and oceans it would persevere. And even in my mind’s eye, I had a hard time seeing no end. Invariably, over some incidental rise or around a random bend would lay what I was sure must be the end. It can’t just go on. Unending—my mind can hardly conceive of such a thing.
Perhaps if I only had a starting point. Maybe if I could begin somewhere I would be able to wrap at least half of my brain around the idea of it. So I start with life, and even more specifically, his life. I retrace the steps and recall the stories. I imagine the sound of his voice and even the smell of his breath. Every detail of him becomes alive to me. I can sometimes hear him in the dead of night, sighing prayers and hoping against hope that the veil of his burden might lift, but it never does. And somehow he remains steadfast, all the way down the road. That road, I cannot help but notice, has an end. An end I don’t like to even think about. I dwell, just for moments, on the slow pain of it. The way that death crept onto him before swallowing him whole, like Jonah and the big fish.
But on the story goes. Past that day. Past that week, even, and on into today. I think about how he’s here with me now and how his presence settles over my heart when I don’t know what to think or who to turn to. I think about the truth of his word. The power of his will. The scope of his love, and then I get lost.
If it had been my goal, from day one until now, I don’t know that I could have hurt him more than I have. I don’t know that I could have been so great a hypocrite or paid so much shallow lip service to his cause. I doubt I could have been any more rebellious. What possible motive have I left him? Have I not out lived his love for me? And then I realize that to do this would be to out do him, and no one does that. His love is that road in my mind and though I have wondered, sometimes deliberately walked and even run down it in an insane effort to find its end, the end does not come. It isn’t over this rise or the next. Not around this bend or any other.
It lies nowhere in the distance, for the road has no end.
