Point Me to the Skies
Remember Mercury? Of course. Ford ceased production of the marquis – and the Grand Marquis – just 11 years ago, after roughly seven decades of memorable models. Who could forget the Cougar Eliminator? Or the Marauders? Or the Comet?
Well, probably everyone. Unless you own one, you probably don’t think of Mercury Comets on a daily basis. But like their celestial namesake, they reappear periodically at the cruise-in, on YouTube, or at auctions. The rest of the time, though, they – the majority of the Mercurys produced during those seven decades – are up there in the Great Beyond, finding their rest in the Great Junkyard in the Sky.
Thinking of the Great Beyond – Heaven – is a useful practice for us. Eternity with our Creator is the eventuality – the permanent state – for Christ-followers. Our time on Earth is temporary. Purposeful, but temporary. This relationship of life and death to life after death is summarized with brilliant economy in Psalm 73:24: “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory.”
The fleeting nature of life, and perhaps this very verse, could have inspired Henry F. Lyte to write what later became the hymn Abide With Me, specifically verse six: “Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes/ shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies/ Heav’n’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee/ in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” To be pointed to the skies and “taken into glory” wasn’t artistic license on Lyte’s part. Perhaps he wasn’t even using figurative language. From 1 Thessalonians 4:18 “…and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”
Yet Lyte, living in the 19th century, couldn’t have predicted the Jet Age imagery of “point me to the skies.” Like a rocket being raised vertically before blasting off into the air, Lyte’s depiction of a faithful Christ-follower’s dying moment conveys drama and finality. A voice in the background could very well be counting down to zero. Every day our bodies succumb a little more to gravity, as flesh sags and cartilage wears thin. Yet ideally, as faithful followers of Christ, our souls are continually being raised upward – through daily justification by God’s grace – until their zenith on our final day.
Like Mercury, we’ll all get roughly seven decades on the planet, Lord-willing. Like a comet, we’ll all live – with the life we get from Christ – in the heavens, while memories of our earthly lives periodically appear in the minds of people whose lives we touched. Until, like memories of Mercury, these memories begin to fade.
The passage from 1 Thessalonians 4 concludes with this sentence: “Therefore encourage one another with these words.” Death, the ultimate finality and the unanswerable stumbling block for every human who ever lived, is nothing but a necessary transition to a permanent state for Christ-followers. Hearing about it is meant to be encouraging, and it is. If, after roughly seven decades on the planet, you also want the peace in your heart to be ready to be pointed to the skies, why not ask for that peace now?
