Inside Our Wedding Bands
For forty-three years now Jan and I have been wearing wedding bands that have a carefully chosen Bible reference engraved on them. “So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.” (2 Cor 5:9).
Our goal is to live in such a manor that Christ would be pleased, smile and say “Well done. I love our life together.” The context of living to please Christ is, for now, a tent, a puptent. A tent is something transitory, a temporary living space which will be taken down and put away. Our body is that tent. It is a temporary living space.
I had a puptent as a kid growing up. In warm summer months I erected the two-man tent in the back yard of our house and periodically slept in it. With my friend Kevin inside it was tight. But when we included his dog, who hilariously slept on his back with his feet protruding in the air, the tent was uncomfortable and hot.
Our bodies are a temporary dwelling, they are tents. Presently my father-in-law is in hospice care at home lying on a hospital bed in his office. Jan and I are his care givers, supported by a nurse who visits him once a week and someone who comes to change his sheets and sponge-bath him. Almost daily we see signs of his tent being slowly dismantled. He cannot get out of bed and will not walk again. He sleeps much, eats little, and weeps silently.
The older we get the more uncomfortable it gets inside the tent that is our bodies. We feel aches and pains that we did not have a couple of years ago. Our energy level is depleting. Doctors visits are increasing. We get to bed earlier.
The decline of the physical body generates a longing for a permanent structure. Heaven is that permanence for which we long. It is the place where we will finally say, “We’re home!”
But what makes a home a home? For the Christian it is not so much the place of heaven but the person whose glory, love, joy, and majesty make heaven heavenly. Our future joy is entering into the joy of the Living God. There we will be fitted with new bodies that are eternal in composition, never to be taken down. These super-bodies will have unlimited energy to relish the love of the one who gave himself for us that we might live with him in unbounded delight and joy.