I’ll Fly Away

Happy Monday morning!  I’m hoping to spend some good time in my garage studio today recording some new songs.  I had been putting some time into getting my alt pop/rock project out there as well as my daughter’s album, and now I’ve got a backlog of songs we’ve already been singing in my congregation and at church camps and stuff but haven’t been able to record and share yet–hoping to work on that over the summer!

Anyway, it’s been a rough season, huh?  If you want a little break from the deep and important conversations we are having about race relations / politics / pandemics / the future of our planet, etc, here’s a happy old song we sang on our live stream a few weeks back. For the Bible scholars, I realize the song is not exactly theologically fully-formed in terms of eschatology but it’s metaphor is apt. (For a thorough investigation of physical resurrection, new heaven and earth, and the ramifications for life in the present, I would recommend Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright.) Our hope is not in this life (1 Cor 15:19).  But rather our “light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor 4:17).   I don’t think focusing on the next life takes away our responsibilities in this one, in fact I think the opposite.  A heavenly focus should inform and direct our everyday.  We should encourage one another with thoughts of heaven and the next life (1 Thess 4:18), and that keeps us going through times of struggle and hardship.

It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed.   – 1 Cor 15:52.

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