Meditation

On a morning of winter cold, I was rushing towards the train station. In ten minutes my train would leave the platform. But I was still fifteen minutes away. My hands freezing, my head dizzy, my feet heavy, I wished I had wings to fly and escape all this pressure. 

To ease the stress, my brain resigned into a hopeful imagination: the warmth inside the house, the comfortable bed, the sweet music, the delicious food, the peace of seclusion! Now six minutes away and the train was leaving in five minutes. How time flies when you don’t think about missing the train, I thought.

I hurried my pace. I was not going to miss this train.

As I turned right, ahead was a young woman dragging along in slow motion as if her feet would not let her move. What is wrong with her, I thought, trying to figure out how to get ahead of her in this narrow way. But I slowed my own pace thinking: she is walking towards the same station; she is probably going for the same train. If she is walking as slowly, it is okay for me to stop rushing. Two minutes left but I was still four minutes away. How time flies when you get distracted, I thought again.

And just then, it hit me. What if she was not going to the station? What if she was going to the station but not to get this train? What if she was only going to meet someone? I was going to miss my train following someone whose goals and plans were not the same as mine. I was going to ruin my day concentrating on somebody else’s life instead of my own.

The doors closed right behind me as I stepped inside the train. Plunged into deep meditation I thought, if that is not the mistake most of us make today! Constantly comparing our life to others, how often we miss the goal! Always wanting to be like others, how easily we fail to be who we are meant to be!

The train carried along the green fields. Looking through the window and into the sky, the stillness of the heavens deepened my thoughts. On our way to heaven, how easy it is to miss eternity because we followed a certain brother or sister. As long as we keep in mind that glorious morning and the grandeur of our heavenly retrouvaille, as long as we think of the beauty of that New Jerusalem and the eternal peace away from the madness of this world, we do just fine and the Coming of our Lord seems much closer to us.

But we miss the goal when we follow the mass. Brother so and so are also going to the rapture yet they still do this and that so it should be okay for us to do it too, we think. That very ‘spiritual’ sister still does this or that and she can’t miss eternity so we can do it too, we like to say.

We fail to be ready because we base our experience on the movement of the crowd. If the pastor spends a year preaching about the rapture, we are all anxious and needing to put things in order. If the believers around us think the rapture will happen the following year, we all rush into ‘repentance’ and listen to sermons and pray ten times a day. If that year passes and nothing happens and some say the Lord might still be giving us sometime, we slow our pace. After all, we all go to the same churches and believe the same Message so it should be okay to act the same. We follow those who are ahead of us; never the One who is Above us and In us.

Just as certain as I was going to miss that train if I had carried on following the pace of the woman before me, we are going to miss this rapture if we carry on following the movements around us. The Lord asked of us one thing: watch and pray. Unless we have Him in mind constantly through the good and the bad times, unless we are ready to say ‘Even so, come Lord Jesus’ under any circumstance, we will surely miss Him when He does come. “It may be morn, it may be night or noon, I know He’s coming soon”