On Friday morning I received a phone call to let me know that a friend had died in the early hours of the morning. She was in her mid forties. It feels too young but her own testimony challenges me – she learnt that she had not been short changed because she had begun to understand eternity. Friday was also the 12th anniversary of my father’s death. He was 66 when he died. I have always felt that was too young – he never even met all of his grandchildren. But he too knew it was eternity that matters. This life is so short whichever decade we leave it in, so short that the Psalmist describes our lives as:
‘a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure.’ (Psalm 39:5)
We feel so secure when we are young we don’t really believe the Psalmist but it becomes more and more evident as the years slip past – eternity is what matters.
I first knew Liz in London when we were in our twenties. The warmth of her friendship somehow always felt like (although I hesitate to use the phrase) some kind of undeserved grace - I know I was never such a good friend to her. She remained single but was one of those people who welcomed you even with four small kids in tow and that is rare! She deliberately organised her life to serve Jesus. She moved to Burford in Oxfordshire to support a gospel ministry, got a secular job and determined to serve in the church there. Our paths did not cross very often although I recall a great day when she took us all to the Cotswold wildlife park. Over the years she reduced her hours to a four-day week instead of five in order to do a course to help her teach the bible better. She worked very hard in her local church; in an interview that she gave at her church she was very clear that facing her last illness she still wished she could do more! She did not wish she could have spent more time at work. She knew that eternity was what mattered.
I am so grateful for her faithful service. On Friday I wanted the Internet to be awash with news of her death, I wanted it announced in the media– an important person has left us and gone home! Of course I knew that wouldn’t happen because her life was not historic. To all appearances from the outside she was just an unassuming, middle-aged spinster. Yet for her church family whom she loved and served she was immensely valuable and I know they will miss her greatly. I was reminded of the final paragraph in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’
She lived a faithful hidden life, not one that will celebrated in the media or even in the Christian press but she will be welcomed by her Lord as a good and faithful servant
She wanted her death to glorify her Lord and during her illness she encouraged others to live in light of eternity. She spoke to anyone who would listen about the gospel and exhorted her church family to:
“Go deeper in your relationship with Jesus.
Go deeper in prayer.
Go deeper in your relationships with one another.”
Loving Jesus, praying and loving his people will not be celebrated in this world as having any value but it is eternity that matters – our relationship with our Lord and his people are the ones that will go on forever. So right now we have important work to do – especially the stuff of the unhistoric variety but they will be the things that will matter for eternity.