Skipping the dot

Through this whole ordeal with Samuel, our family has had many meaningful discussions. While I was still pregnant T1 (my 12 year old) and I were talking about our life...

I told him that our life just wasn't working out the way I had hoped. Papa and I had tried to serve the Lord since we were married and in my mind, somehow I thought if you are doing the right thing, life will be "good", or maybe it's just that what I thought was good wasn't really as important to God as it was to me. But our life has been hard in many ways of late. My husband was unemployed for most of 2009, we have a FOR SALE sign outside in the front yard...and we were going to be burying another baby. But as I pondered all of these things, I realized that what is most important to me, all that really matters is that we all get to heaven.

My son got really excited and told me that while he was reading this book, he started thinking about how loooong eternity is. It's mind boggling. He said, "Our lives are so short compared to eternity and yet where we spend eternity is all based on this short little period of time that we live."

Then he said, "When you think about it, who cares if our life is bad? Really Mama, WHO CARES?! As long as we make it to heaven. It's all that matters."

It's so true.

If you think of eternity stretched out as a never-ending horizontal line and our life represented by a small dot on this never-ending line, we realize how short our lives are. We can endure hardships for a mere 80-90 years can't we? Especially if we have an eternity of happiness to look forward to?

At Samuel's Memorial service they had an open mic for people to share. My friend's daughter (10 years old) shared that in her Bible study she was reading about how Jesus healed the blind man and how Jesus was the first person the blind man ever saw. Then she said, "Jesus was the first person Samuel saw."

A week after Samuel was born the kids and I were laying on my bed. I said, "Samuel has been in Heaven for one week today."

T1 said, "I remember when you said that about Isabel."

Really?

I did?

And you remember?

That was depressing.

I probably did.

I can't believe my kids had to hear me say that twice in 3 years.


So after I got over that, we lay there talking about what it must have been like for Samuel. We were daydreaming about it. He was in the womb, safe and warm and unaware of things, and then he was in heaven. It must have been like emerging, not as a baby hazily emerges from the womb, but waking up, fully conscious, fully aware...into heaven. That was all he would ever know in his life...heaven.

We lay there staring up at the ceiling, thinking of this concept in quiet contemplation when my son said,

"He skipped the dot."

"Samuel skipped the dot and went straight to the line."

We smiled together (me through tears) at the thought. We had just received a costly nugget of truth from God, something we had worked hard to earn.
We are living the dot.
The dot isn't important.
The line is.
Are you living your dot in order to get to the right line?