Craige McMillan, Novelist ©2018. Armageddon Story. Reader's page.
Dispatches Across Eternity. A novelist looks at Earth's Final Kingdom.

AirAisa Flight QZ8501
Airliner flying into sunset. AirAsia Flight QZ8501 enters eternity.

Crosses Into Eternity
by Craige McMillan
None of us are so very far from eternity at any given time as we imagine, are we? Here is a great description of our situation from "The End of Christendom," a short address given at a university in Canada by Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the great witnesses and also a journalist to the Twentieth Century:

"You know, it's a funny thing when you're very old, as I am, seventy-five and near to dying, the queerest (oddest) thing happens. You very often wake up about two or three in the morning and you are half in and half out of your body, a most peculiar situation. You can see your battered old carcass there between the sheets and it's quite a tossup whether you resume full occupancy and go through another day or make off where you can see, like the lights in the sky as you're driving along, the lights of Augustine's City of God" (p.24).

It's easy to forget that we as human beings are residents of two communities as we go through this life. One is the physical and material world we see around us. It is here that we see our friends, celebrate holidays with our relatives, and shop for gifts for those we care about.

Fewer and fewer of us glimpse the Eternal community that Mr. Muggeridge describes as beckoning, which is anyhow our final destination. All our focus is on the here and now. We lack perspective.

If you go back to the earliest passages in the Bible, or the Torah if you are Jewish, there is this short description of our situation:

"And they heard the voce of the LORD God walking in the garden toward the cool of the day…" —Jewish Publication Society Bible

Although man is a physical created being, the Creator, in the form of a person, came to visit the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden, toward the end of the day.

In early creation, death did not exist. The physical creation and the eternal Creator happily coexisted and even visited one another.

Today we see it at best as Mr. Muggeridge described, on our beds at night. Or perhaps as the Apostle Paul described:

"We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!" —1 Corinthians 13:12 (The Message)

Each of us has an appointed time to leave this material world, and move into our Eternal home. We tend to think of that as our old age, as Muggeridge describes in the opening quote. It is heartbreaking for families when events intervene, and that departure comes early.

For an expanded view of this post, check out Reconnaissance, the first volume in the Armageddon Story Series. In that story you will meet the Admiral, but not in the permanent manner that the loved ones on Flight 8501 did a few days ago. You will still have time to consider who he is, what he is up to, and how it might affect you, as you live in this material world.

Images of aircraft in the Public Domain

 

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Pen graphic for contacting novelist Craige McMillan, creator of the Armageddon Story; Judgment, Interrupted novel series
Copyright 2018 Craige McMillan. All Rights Reserved.
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