Eyes on the eternal

Dr Tom

As you can tell, I (Bea) have been spending a lot of time lately going through our wedding photos and editing them and picking ones out to post and eventually to put in an album. It's been fun to do it - reliving some wonderful days six months down the road. But it also caused me to feel the same anxious insecurity with my options and choices and gnawing obsession with comparing that plagued me throughout the wedding planning months. I thought after a wonderful day of worshiping and committing ourselves to God and each other, an unforgettable honeymoon, and months of deep enjoyment of being my husband's companion would put to sleep all those concerns about superficial things - the dress, the hair, the pictures, the decor. But going through pictures made the horrible questions of "what if" flare up in full force.

I looked at friends' wedding pictures on Facebook, and wished our photographers had captured moments like those in these other albums, giving our friends a chance to leave similarly admiring comments. I sought instant gratification - or rather instant affirmation - and reduced the worthiness of the day to fragments of praise from clicking friends.

I started obsessively going through the blogs of other photographers we had looked at - and feeling more and more convinced that we had made the wrong choice. All irrational behavior of course, but I couldn't stop myself.  I even tried to find a particular photographer who was a close second choice and tried to see if they had shot a wedding on the weekend we had gotten married, to try to imagine "what could have been". Realizing they didn't have a wedding on that same day, I looked at the ones in the weeks before and after, throughout July and August 2010.

I knew I was chasing after something that was very superficial, and was being lured by a voracious and deceptive industry. But it was of no use - my tastes and priorities had been shaped in such a way during the months of planning. And looking at the thick stack of wedding magazines still sitting on our shelf, I know I had allowed myself to be shaped like this.

The January theme at our church for Sunday services has been "A Missional Encounter." A few speakers came and talked about the persecuted church around the world, and the need to take God's call for harvesters seriously and self-sacrificially. This past Sunday, the speaker mentioned Dr. Tom Little, martyred in Afghanistan. His name caught my ear, and I remembered having read about him in a TIME article.

The speaker had known Dr Tom personally, and this is what he told us: Dr Tom and his wife had spent 30 years in Afghanistan and raise their three children there. In the weeks before his death, and he had gone on a mission to a remote village with his team, and his wife Libby had remained at home. On August 3, he talked to Libby for the last time. "Well, talk to you again when I've crossed the river." On August 5, he was killed.

Though I had read about Dr Tom before, but this Sunday it hit me - Dr Tom died a mere three weeks after our wedding. Here I was obsessing over what other weddings occurred during this time, while these men and women all over the world had set their eyes on something far greater, on something eternal. Here was a man who lived and died to Christ.

I was ashamed. Months before the wedding planning frenzy began, I had written in my journal: "Lord, use us to bring your salvation to the nations!"  When did that prayer become: "Give me a picture-perfect wedding?"

That sermon was God's gracious gift - a jolting wake-up call to see how far my heart had drifted over the year before the wedding - how I had gradually but surely become so entitled, indulgent, lusting after the praise of man, how I had allowed my commitment to God's call to be diluted to mere lip service.

Pictures are good - they are a way to chronicle joy and love. But in heaven there will be no need for memories. Beyond this is the eternal, and we should live investing in what will last.


"What if thousands of trumpets loudly blared your praise? Would this prepare you to cross the Jordan or cheer you in the face of judgment?... But when you have God for your portion, you have more than all else put together. In Him every need is met, whether in life or in death." - Charles Spurgeon