Beyond the Horizon

"Death has been swallowed up in victory…Therefore…your labor in the Lord is not in vain."
1 Corinthians 15:54, 58 (NIV)

Watch a ship move away from shore and there comes a point when it disappears. First the hull drops out of sight, then the upper decks, until nothing shows above the water. Nothing has happened to the ship at the horizon. The ship has traveled farther than anyone on shore can see, and hardly anyone worries, because the ship is still sailing. We are less sure about our own lives. On our last day at a job, we hand the work to someone else and rarely see what happens to the work. Could that last day feel more like an ending than it really was?

With a ship, someone down the coast usually sees the ship again. In daily life, hardly anyone comes back to tell us what our efforts produced. We know what we gave, the hours and the patience. What we do not often know is what difference those years made in the people we gave them to. Paul, an early Christian missionary writing to believers in the Greek city of Corinth, was answering people who had recently buried friends. He tells them, "the dead will be raised ... and we will be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:52). A hope we buried, or work we decided was wasted, may still be alive where we cannot see.

A teacher retires, and the students keep growing up out of sight. A neighbor moves away and raises her children in a city we never visit. In both cases our watching ended while their lives kept going, and we learn to live with these endings. Paul is looking at the widest ending of all, the day a whole life passes out of view. "Death has been swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15:54), he writes, and God "gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 15:57). We hope life keeps going after we can no longer watch it. Paul says something stronger, that a victory has already been won.

Then one small word in Paul's letter becomes hard to ignore. "Therefore," Paul writes, "stand firm...Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58). Most of his readers were not preachers. They had shops to open, bread to bake, children to feed. Paul has just written about God's victory over death, and the next thing he mentions is ordinary work the next morning. Why would Paul attach an ordinary morning of work to a promise as large and certain as this one? Maybe the lasting value of a day's work was never measured by how much of the work we live to see.

Most of us keep a ledger of results, even if we never write them down. We want to know whether the years made a difference. The trouble is that we seldom see the last entry. Paul had already told this church that their labor in the Lord is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58). We are standing on one shore, watching one stretch of water. Maybe the question is no longer only, "What did all of this accomplish?" Maybe a second question can sit beside the first one, "How much of the story was ever mine to see?"

Prayer

Jesus, when I reach the end of what I can see, help me remember that my vision is not the measure of Your work. Teach me to trust what continues beyond my sight. Amen.