So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
– 2 Corinthians 4:18 (Holman Christian Bible)
One moment he felt strong and young and immortal. The next moment, his life crashed around him, the veil between two worlds torn.
In the space between one breath and the next, a teenager discovered which world is real.
Kevin was traveling in Canada with a youth ministry team when the accident happened. He and a friend worked on music during a quiet summer afternoon at the church where they stayed. Feeling restless, Kevin talked his friend into helping him practice the backflips he had been learning.
The first couple of flips went smoothly. On the next, Kevin didn’t make the rotation and came down hard on his head. His neck snapped forward, and he instantly lost all feeling. He watched his body fall to the ground, like it didn’t belong to him.
He also stopped breathing. The air in his lungs escaped like a long sigh. Panicked, his friend ran for help.
As Kevin lay alone, dying in the grass of the church lawn, he heard a voice so clearly he thought it was audible.
The voice was God’s. He told Kevin he would be okay.
In those last moments before he lost consciousness, Kevin felt no fear. As darkness closed in, the presence of God was overpowering.
Help finally arrived. Kevin was revived, put on life support, and flown to a hospital in Calgary. There he began the long journey back to this life.
Kevin survived the spinal cord injury that paralyzed him eighteen years ago. And he finally learned to breathe again on his own after two years on life support. But he says that one moment when God spoke to him was so powerful, nothing else since has seemed real. To him, the eternal that he experienced between breaths is the true reality.
The dimension in which he still lives is the imposter.
Beyond our physical senses lies a realm far above our earthly experience.
Like electricity and the wind, we only know it’s there because we can see its effects.
This is the great irony of God’s wisdom. The world we see is temporary. The unseen one is eternal. We who believe are called pilgrims because we journey from one land to the next. We’re just passing through this world, living in the tents we call bodies.
We’re not supposed to invest too much into this space in time. We’re not supposed to live for today. We’re called to send our treasure on ahead of us to the other realm, where it can never be lost.
A day is coming for us to leave our tents behind.
It’s a fearsome thing because tents are all we know. But we can trust in the power of God to take us safely between breaths to the place where life infuses the golden air of forever.
Forever is real. We’re going to be okay. Trust in the Lord, sojourner.
There’s a mansion just beyond the veil.
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
– 2 Corinthians 1:5
