Sometimes we can remember exactly where we were at a certain significant moment. One such moment for me happened in the city of Munich in August 1989. I was talking with the editor of a respected magazine on International affairs. I remember asking him how long more the Soviet Union would last. ‘Five years’, he answered without even pausing to consider his answer.
Only the following day the Hungarian Communist Government left a border post with Austria open for some hours and hundreds of East Germans fled into Austria and an uncertain freedom. In a sense that gap in the border was never to be closed, and on 10 November the wall in Berlin was breached and the Soviet Union was for all intents and purposes over. It did not need five years, not even five months.
It was an exhilarating moment when millions of people recovered their freedom from a terrible tyranny. It was a moment of great hopes, and its significance for me was that it was then I sensed the role of change in God’s plan for us, his people.
A poet had put it well when he said God wanted his much loved people to have every good thing, and described each blessing God so lovingly gave us. But at the last minute he withheld one final blessing – rest. The poet thought God was afraid we would rest happily with God’s gifts instead of wanting the Giver of all gifts.
So God ordained change, giving us almost infinite desires, but no rest. We rest when we have achieved our heart’s desire, but nothing in life ever fully meets our heart’s desire. Because we associate pain and sorrow with the loss of what we love, we learn not to want change. We settle for half, we settle for less than God made us for. God, you see, does not deprive us of anything, when there’s change he sets us free from a lesser good to embrace a greater good. In heaven we have lost nothing of all we loved, we have it all but now also God himself, the source of all goodness and we can rest satisfied at last. For us in death life is changed, not ended.
Maybe St. Augustine put it best when he said memorably, ‘You made us for yourself, O Lord and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you!’
John Looby, Editor