When does eternal life start?

Eternal life
When I was a teenager, in the church where I came to faith in Jesus Christ, they liked to emphasize the present tense of the verbs in 1 John 5:14: He that hath the Son hath life (they only used the King James Version). As I remember, this focus was about having the assurance of salvation and eternal security – the present possession of the gift of eternal life meant that one could say with confidence, “If I were to die tonight I know I would go to heaven.”

Eternal life itself seemed to be viewed primarily in the future, however. It was rather like a minor knowing that a large fortune has been set aside for him in a trust fund, available to him only when he becomes an adult. He knows it is there, and is guaranteed that he will be able to live comfortably on it then, but its benefit to him right now is limited to having that confident hope for the future.

Not that hope isn’t a wonderful thing to have. (It’s on my H list for three days from now.) But in other churches I learned later to see 1 John 5:12 in a new way. Eternal life is a current possession, something I have and can enjoy right now. It starts when I become a Christian, and simply never ends. Physical death entails some kind of change in its nature – a change all for the good from my perspective. But physical death isn’t the beginning of eternal life, only the end of mortality.

So what makes eternal life here and now different from life here and now without it? Words that come to mind are joyful obedience, answered prayer, Spirit-empowered (to serve, not to control). Only problem is, those are more descriptions of what I know abundant life in Christ is supposed to be like than a report of my own experience.

Certainly my life today is more in line with this than before my conversion at age 14. But then, thirty plus years of living might have something to do with that. Not that people always mature as they age, but there is no way I can say how my life today might compare with what it might have been if I had continued as a somewhat religious agnostic.

WOMAN Activity Tracker: Update

Nothing big to report, just plodding along doing my 10,000+ steps a day, five or more days a week. I finished the first virtual “trip” from Texas to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and started a new one in the Northeast. Here I’ll actually “visit” places I know, from Boston to Hartford (where I grew up) to New Brunswick (where my husband went to seminary) to Lancaster (where his grandmother used to live, and the whole family would gather for holidays).

I had thought that by now I would be walking lots with the new puppy, but the extent of our walking is usually up and down the sidewalk from the house to the driveway. And once she figured out that I was going to turn around each time and return to the house, she stopped following me even that far – especially as I don’t let her pounce on and bite my shoes and pants. I have tried the leash, but her only interest is in chewing on it. (My husband had more success, perhaps due to his larger size.) I bought a DVD on loose-leash training, but as the DVD player is in the basement and Kyra isn’t allowed down there yet, I haven’t had time to watch it.

My weight continues to drop, but very slowly now. I hope by November, when it will have been a year since I changed my eating habits, to have lost a total of forty pounds. Which leaves me about two months for the last three or four pounds.

WOMAN Activity Tracker: Update

I’m finishing up my fourth week using this year-round activity tracker, and it seems to be working. Now that I have light in my exercise room again (the fluorescent lights in there never came back on after the power failure last week, despite trying new bulbs and starters, so I finally went out and bought a new floor lamp for $10 at Wal-Mart, which we figured was cheaper than calling an electrician), I’m back to riding my exercise bike regularly.

I also enjoyed the chance to go walking in the park the other evening, and added another four miles to the four I had walked earlier in the day. (My pedometer shows that I walk about four miles over the course of a typical day, largely from walking to and from my car in the parking lot, to and from the breakroom at work, plus an almost daily ramble through the supermarket trying to notice things I need to buy but haven’t thought to put on my list.)

I haven’t been keeping track of what weight I’ve lost when, since I’m just tracking activity, but I think I’ve lost about ten pounds since the 100-day Challenge ended. I’ve certainly had to dig through my dresser drawers and the back of the closet to find pairs of pants that have been waiting a few years for me to get back into them. (I don’t intend to give the newly too-big pairs the same opportunity to get any further use from me; they will have to find new owners at Goodwill.)

WOMAN Challenge: Update and restart

Due to a bonus point earned two weeks ago, I coasted into Washington, D.C. a few days early, completing my 8-week virtual cross-country trip. Thus I rather lacked ambition to push myself the last few days of the week, which I suppose means the program was working to motivate me along the way.

Unlike the previous stops on my virtual trip, I have actually been to Washington, D.C.  My favorite spot is the Museum of American History (temporarily closed for renovations, but virtual visits work just fine as the website isn’t closed). My older sister liked spending hours in the Museum of Natural History, but the only exhibits I remember finding interesting there were the illustrations comparing the relative size of body parts in infants and adults, and one that I really disliked seeing but couldn’t help staring at, of trepanning (primitive surgery to remove a piece of bone from the skull).

WOMAN Challenge: Update

In the two weeks since my last update, I have somehow jumped from western Kansas to eastern Kentucky. Which means I’m still keeping up with my exercise program, despite not posting an update last week. Harrisonville, Missouri turned out to be a somewhat uninteresting place to stop, at least for someone doing a virtual tour by internet.

The city’s website claims that “Harrisonville is known for successfully preserving its rich antebellum history while, at the same time, building a future that embodies progress and economic vitality.” No doubt it is, but its website gives no links to any information about that rich antebellum history, nor to any places of interest to tourists. I suppose it’s nice to have a city that can focus on its own citizens instead of trying to lure tourists in, but it didn’t seem worth a blog post to say so. 

WOMAN Challenge: Update

When I set my goal this week (10,000 steps/day) I wondered whether I could really do it. But of course that’s the point of making goals, to push yourself to do better than you would do by not making them. And again, to my surprise, I found each day that I had walked further than the previous week. One day I was within two hundred steps of my goal even without counting the twenty minutes on the exercise bike (which counts as 4240 steps using their conversion calculator).

So I moved on eastward, from Colorado into Kansas. The first thing I had to learn about where I had stopped was how to spell it. I was very surprised that I found so few hits when I did a search for WaKenney, although I carefully spelled it exactly as it appeared on the map showing my progress. I had expected any place picked to appear on these virtual routes to be big enough to have its own website.

WOMAN Challenge: Update

I guess this program must be working. I’m not aware of doing significantly more walking lately, but when I check the pedometer at the end of the day, I discover I have walked two or three thousand steps more than I was doing in a day three weeks ago.

I have done my 20 minutes on the exercise bike every weekday morning this week (Monday was a holiday and didn’t count), and one evening when I was going to let the dishes in the sink wait until morning, I did them anyway, just because I needed another five or ten minutes activity to record.

WOMAN Challenge: Update

I had expected to “arrive” in Hanksville, Utah by now. It is the next town marked on the map of my cross country virtual route, the second of eight leading from my starting point to my destination. As I’ve completed the second of eight weeks and earned my full two points for meeting my goals, it does seem logical to find myself there, nearing the eastern border of Utah.

But no, my progress map shows me closer to the western border of Utah, probably near Milford, where last year the largest wildfire in Utah’s history burned over 360,000 acres. Started by lightning July 6 and spreading faster than many veteran firefighters said they had ever seen, it was finally contained July 19.

Books on tape: The Emperor’s General

I need to find better books to listen to while riding my exercise bike. Not that The Emperor’s General is not a good book - but it doesn’t work like a Dick Francis novel to pull me out of bed in the morning so I can go get on the bike, put on my Walkman, and listen to the next installment of a riveting story.

I also prefer Dick Francis’s heroes. Not supermen, they nevertheless are tenacious, brave, and generally self-sacrificing (and nearly always end up getting beat up at least once, for having poked their noses in the bad guys’ affairs in order to defend the weak and do what is right).

Captain Jay Marsh is a reasonably good man, who tries in general to do the right thing and regrets his weakness in certain areas. But sometimes I actually did not want to continue the story – did not want to hear him continue to make mistakes that would end up hurting both him and someone he loved.

The story he tells does ring true, however. Jay is young and naïve, and I have to admit I was no wiser or better at that age. If I wrote a story of my own life, I would not like reading the chapters of those years.

WOMAN Challenge: Update

I have just arrived at Goldfield, Nevada, in my virtual trip across the country. In non-virtual terms, I’ve walked (or exercised the equivalent) about ten miles. Not a lot, but perhaps a bit more than I would have done if I hadn’t been trying to make my goal each day.

This afternoon, for instance, my son asked to go to the park. Rather than sitting on a bench reading a book while he played, as I usually would, I walked in a large circuit around the field containing the playground. On my second time around, he decided to join me, and together we logged another one thousand steps.