Life is a Vapor

Scripture tells us that we are as dust, fading like flowers and grasses of the field. Life is a vapor, blown away and gone with seeming insignificance. And parts of our life and many of our memories are that way. We have moments of “smallness” and vulnerability that give our hearts a proper orientation to the universe and to God. But sometimes that smallness and vulnerability is accompanied by a jagged rawness that is powerfully and unfailingly hard.

Life as a vapor seems a joke when we wake up confronted by the concrete reality of suffering and death. There is no sense of “vapor-ness” when anxiety suffocates and grinds you down with raw anguish or despair. Cancer is unrelenting in its disabuse of our vapor lives because its pain is so deep, confusion so profound, and ferocity so unmitigated.

Nothing about life feels a vapor when nothing seems to be right in the world. Life presses in on us with no mercy when we get that late night phone call or that dreaded confession from a spouse. We wish we were more vapor-like when the slings and arrows of the world pierce our bodies and souls. Instead of vapor we can experience life as a rock against which we are broke.

When we touch and taste and feel and hear the solid, physical realities of a broken world it seems that the vapor-ness of our lives have lost contact with that which is ultimately ours: a soul made for eternity.

The truth that is so easy to lose hold of is the world that will fade away. With that, our pains and sorrows and struggles and grief will become as vapors. On the other side of death we realize that we ourselves were not the vapors. Instead it was what life and the world handed us that were vapors. Whether grief or sorrow or health and wealth, they are vapors. Our eternity will shed full light on these vapors that we can never make sense of in the here and now.

I’ve got no words of comfort for those lamenting and despairing the brutal concreteness of life right now. They would seem trite and out of place. The only encouragement I can give is that for those in Christ hope does spring eternal. Hope is not a vapor and is not of this world and is not contingent upon the concrete, pressing realities that make one’s soul despair.

So I don’t offer a particular word of hope. I don’t have a quick fix or a passage of scripture to run to (though there are many). Neither do I hold promises for hope to be found in your timing or according to your plans. God holds that control.

What I can say from experience is that we can train our hearts to see and notice hope. Not made up, good-report-from-the-doctor, or abating-of symptoms-and-sufferings hope, but true and real and eternal hope. We can cultivate our senses to pick up on hope. It becomes just as physical as our pains and sorrows and we can touch, taste, and see it, hold it in our hands, and share it with others. And somehow, by God's grace overtime we can find the the hope we find in Him is able to swallow up our misery and sorrow. There isn't a forgetting of the pain but a sweetening of the soul that gives us strength to fight for joy.

Train your heart. It was made to hold on to the eternal hopes and joys to found in Christ.

In a pitch black room the tiniest flicker of light from a struck match can shed light on everything. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” May God grant us eyes to see and share that light through the vapors of this world.