A Future for Fellowship
Eschatological hope for the unsociable social animal
I was a really awkward teenager.1
While for the most part I was, I think, fairly well-intentioned, I made enough dumb social decisions that there are people I really enjoyed talking to but eventually wound up outside speaking terms with. So goes life.
As an adult, for the first several years of marriage, my wife and I often felt like any new people we met and liked would vanish almost immediately upon our getting to know them. So also goes life.
Since becoming a teacher, I have become acutely aware of the vaporous nature of even this role. Students come and go, even the best and most beloved. Many will, indeed, hardly remember me. Still, so goes life.
Amid the many persons and families I see at church and school, there are a number of people I might like to talk to, but there’s no telling if we will ever really know each other before our paths diverge. Even here, so goes life.
I don’t mention all these things to whine or lament. Don’t take them too melodramatically. Rather, my point is that life in a fallen world is full of partings, and often far too early or far too unpleasant. Many potential relationships in this life―whether of friendship, love, or anything else―fall apart, fade away, or never even get going. The opportunity is gone, and there remains but a rift.
This can be sad, frustrating, or disappointing, but sometimes I go back and think about the ramifications of heaven here. Those relations which decline, deteriorate, or are even destroyed in this life, when they are with people in Christ (or who will be in the end), are simply not over, even if you never speak again until you die.
Instead, after the end,2 we will be cleansed of our sins all the way through, leaving none of our guilt, nor shame, nor ongoing vices, nor even our weaknesses and fears and foibles. Our darkness will be replaced by light, and we will each become the clear and shining prisms of God’s glory to our full potential. The past will truly be the past, and an infinite future of nothing but goodness and light will open up to us.
In this infinite future, it seems we will have infinite occasions to redress any of these missed, broken, or incomplete relationships. That person you never got a chance to really talk to: you could spend 10,000 years getting to know them and God’s goodness in them without taking away from any of your other opportunities. The friend you moved away from need never be more than a twinkling of an eye apart again, and you have an endless holiday on which to reestablish your acquaintance. If you have alienated people, whether by sin or awkwardness or both (on your side or theirs), bygones will be bygones, and nothing will be left between you but love and a boundless opportunity to develop such a rich gladness together that all your old separation will seem nothing more than a quick stub of the toe before setting off on the real journey. All the while, in all these cases, filled with the vision of God and His unrestrained love, each pleasure we find in these glorified image bearers will only redound all the more to His own glory and our ever-unfolding delight in the Source Himself.
As I write this, I am somewhat struck by how simple and perhaps unremarkable of an insight it really is. Perhaps for some of you it will strike no particular chord at all in your heart or imagination. Be that as it may, I find it a blessed note of hope in the shifting social shadows of this life. May we all be reunited in the heavenly life, evermore to grow in love and delight in our Father’s house.
For now, we will not ask whether anything besides “teenager” is in past tense here.
Or, rather, the real Beginning…