Forever is terrifying

I try to go to church every week, although often times I'm not very successful at that. Through my four years at Waynesburg I could never really find a church I really liked so there were a lot of weeks I didn't go at all. This summer was a bit tough to because for the first four months I was working every Sunday. But now I have a new job and I don't work weekends often and my old church now has a campus in the city, so I'm back to going regularly. The church formerly known as Pittsburgh East is now called Amplify Church and they have services in the Strip District every Sunday night at 6, I highly recommend checking it out.

Anyways, I'm not here to preach, but tonight the pastor talked a bit about heaven and eternity, two pretty common elements of Christianity. I've personally never liked thinking about eternity, because it's horrifying to me. Growing up I've seen my mom always get really excited and hopeful when talking about what happens after we die, she cannot wait to get to heaven, which is probably how I should look at it as well. But for whatever reason I just can't say I'm not scared of the concept of eternity. It doesn't make sense to me. I'll start thinking about it and then I'll shortly realize that my brain doesn't have the ability to think in that way. I can't even control my own thoughts about it, which makes me nervous.


I'm sure heaven's gonna be great, but I still try to not think about it very much. What I'm wondering now is how people that don't believe in eternity deal with life. I'm sure there are some people that don't really believe in heaven reading this right now, so don't take this like I'm criticizing you in any way, I'm just honestly confused as to how you live your life. How can you go through this life knowing that everything you'll ever do or become will just go away forever someday. How can you be okay with working some okay job and doing a bunch of really average things every day knowing that your time here is limited? Do these people just not think about it and ignore the realization of a true end to life? That is even more terrifying, and I don't understand how people can go through life like that. I've never been the kind of guy to come at people for their religious beliefs not matching up with mine, it's not my business what you believe and it would be incredibly hypocritical or me to think less of a person for what they believe. I think I've done a good job with being respectful to people thus far, and I want to let everyone know that this post isn't knocking people who think differently than me, I just simply don't understand. If you could pick what to believe (which I understand that you really can't in a lot of cases), like if you had total control of what you believe, wouldn't you choose to believe in God and heaven and eternity? Doesn't that sound a ton better than just dying and not having a soul that goes anywhere? It seems more appealing to me, but again it's largely irrelevant.

Life's short, that's one of the most overused cliche's there is, but it's true. I feel like people just go through the motions way too much. Doesn't wasting a single day here seem like a horrible idea when you step back and look at how short and irrelevant a human life can be? Yikes.

Imagine you're running and following a telephone wire to get to your final destination. You don't know where the end of it is, but you know you'll get there eventually. Now let's say that the final destination is you dying, and let's say that there are various places to stop and people to meet and talk to along the way. Would there be a stop you wouldn't quit running for? Would there be a single person you wouldn't want to meet and connect with, knowing what you know about the end of the wire? Of course not, because you know you want to squeeze every single moment out of the trip because at the end it's all over and you can't go back.

Why don't we think about life like that? Every second is just another second closer to us dying and being off of this earth, so why aren't we squeezing every little moment out of the short time we do have? Again, super cliche and probably not actually very groundbreaking stuff I'm saying here, but I thought of that analogy the other day while I was running and I figured I'd share it. So there you go.