I’m so grateful to be hosting my friend Kate Motaung on the blog today!
Kate grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. She spent ten years living in Cape Town, where she met and married a South African. They and their three kids are back in the States where she writes and edits, and hosts Five Minute Friday. Grab a copy of her beautiful eBook, Letters to Grief, which she wrote upon losing her mom to cancer.
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One day, my son was eating a Freezer Pop—you know, the plastic sleeves with frozen juice inside that you squeeze up from the bottom. He came over to me and said, “Hey, Mom—this is what my life is like now,” and he bit off a tiny segment of the popsicle.
Then he held up the remaining stick of colored ice and said, “And this is my life in heaven.”
A child’s object lesson in the temporary blip that is our earthly life, compared to the lasting enjoyment of heaven. Of course, heaven won’t melt away—but his mind was on eternity.
In less than a minute and with a mundane prop, he reminded me that this life is just the first bite of the popsicle. That it’s going to melt quickly, and the best is yet to come.
It’s so easy these days to get all tripped up by the untied shoelaces of wanting and having.
We’re so good at building our sandcastles on the shore, packing them with earthly treasures until we’re busting at the seams and decide we better build an addition onto the two-stall garage. We forget that the tide is coming in, and the waves are going to wash our castle away.
Without realizing it, we can encourage this kind of thinking in our children, too, when the bulk of our conversations revolve around the latest Lego sets, and how much longer they’ll have to save before they have enough money for violin lessons or a telescope.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with Legos or violins or telescopes. The problem creeps in when those things are all we’re looking forward to, and what we want the most.
When life revolves around when we’re going to have those things.
Because as we all know, things will not satisfy.
So we talk about our earthly wants and what it means to store up treasures in heaven, and we try to keep things in perspective. When the remote control airplane is missing a piece and doesn’t fly anymore, we acknowledge the disappointment but realize we can’t take the plane with us to heaven. We thank God for the gifts here, and enjoy them with sincere gratitude, but hold them loosely with upturned palms, for “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1).
And we remember that heaven and earth and popsicles will pass away, but His words will never pass away (Matthew 24:35). Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King.
Maybe even sooner than it takes to eat a Freezer Pop.
[This post first appeared on the website, Heading Home, on July 30, 2014.]
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Happy weekend to you! Go ahead and share Kate’s post if it resonated with you. You’re also welcome leave a comment, or get in touch here, on Twitter, or on our Facebook community page.
Here’s what’s on the menu, if you’re reading this in an email:
Dalene Reyburn 