Overflowing

"And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
Phil. 4:7

We and our friends have come through several storms lately -- relational, economic, you name it. But through it all, and now mostly on the other side of it, I've just felt such a sense of peace. It does "transcend all understanding," doesn't it? It doesn't make sense. Albert Camus said “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” I think I'm beginning to see the summer God has put in my soul.
I've thought so much in the last decade about the biblical admonition to build your house on the rock, where storms will not overcome it, and to store your treasure in Heaven, where moths can't destroy it. What rock? What treasure? I think I'm starting to understand. I heard a children's pastor named Jim Sumner preach to children one day about the "meaning of life." He told them that grown-ups are always searching for "the meaning of life" but he was going to save them years of wandering by telling them straight out: the meaning if life is found in relationships. My dad has been known to say that relationships are the only things we can take with us to Heaven.

For me building my treasure where moth and rust cannot destroy means building my life around relationships. And the Rock, on which the house is built, is my relationship with God.

In the last "Anne" book I finished, one of Anne's extremely frivolous friends gets seriously ill and finally dies. On the day she dies she has a conversation with Anne wherein she says that she's afraid to go to Heaven because it will be so different than her life on Earth, and nothing there will be the things that were important to her before death. Anne realizes that her friend is right that Heaven will be very different than her life because this friend has built her entire life around shallow relationships and pretty dresses. Anne vows to live her life so that Heaven will be filled with familiar things that she's already loved.

This is obviously one of those rambling posts that's more for my benefit than for the benefit of the reader, but I suppose what I'm working out while writing it is that nothing can shake Heaven. If I can build my life around what lasts forever, it won't collapse when shaken by things that don't.