OK, erase the board and send the next student up

In Luke Chapter 20:37-38, Jesus says that God is not "God of the dead but of the living: for all live unto him." To look at this another way, everything past present and future is all present with God. The completion of a new house with the paint just drying is just as much present with God as the completion of a newer house on the site of the original and the lean-to a hunter used to keep the rain off a thousand years before.

Nothing we build really lasts in this world. The American habit of trying to turn every other building into a historical monument to be preserved for eternity promises to pave the countryside with bronze plaques and clog the cities with untouchable "Rank Lloyd Frights." If we weren't blessed with so much space the silliness of it all would be more vivid.

It is humiliating to think that little or nothing I do will even last my own lifetime, but it makes sense to design a world this way. If everything we made endured and was honored in the world forever, we'd run out of places to build new gardens. In a world where everything has to be maintained, and eventually replaced, there's room for my children to design something different when my things wear out. The same decay that tears down my designs gives scope to theirs.

All of which is very cold comfort, since I want my work to have some meaning and some finality. And, of course, it does--not because future generations will stare at my palaces in awe, but because God (remember Him?) holds everything eternally present. The work I did laying bricks is present with God, though the building was destroyed; and He judges whether I was careful or sloppy and built with love or with greed. One day no man will know English, and every word I've written will be lost: except to God.

God is not just an archivist, but the judge. And if my works and His judgement of them are eternally present with Him, it seems likely that they will also be present with me hereafter--and I've done a lot that I'm not proud of. Will that last? 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 seems to refer to this: the evil gone and the careless burned away--what remains?

I suffer from the same malady as many others: things I can see and touch seem more real than what and Who I know exists behind them. So I'm distracted into valuing only the physical and neglecting the eternal. May God forgive and correct.