The Hope of Heaven in a Travel Nightmare
We thought we were coming to the end of a long and exhausting travel day. Our flight was supposed to take off at noon. It was now 6:00pm. Our 2.5 year old daughter and 4 month old son had been rockstars through all of the delays and changed plans, but we were all ready for it to be done.
We boarded the plane, sighed a breath of relief and set up a movie on my phone for our daughter to watch during the flight.
She watched all of Toy Story and half of The Little Mermaid before we left the gate.
Mechanical problems. Weather delays. One more check to make sure everything was good to go. We finally took off at 8:15pm and landed at our destination at 11pm. My mental and emotional state as we walked into baggage claim was haggard at best. My husband and I held our sleeping children as we waited for our bags. Everything arrived in perfect condition.
Everything except our daughter’s car seat.
“At the airport, just not sure where,” was what the help desk told us.
We waited 2 hours for them to find it.
I wish I could tell you I handled this day with grace upon grace. But by the time we realized our car seat was missing, I lost my mind. I sat down with our sleeping baby and my now awake and over-tired toddler and cried in baggage claim. All I could think was “This nightmare is never going to end. We are never getting out of this airport.”
And then? It was over. Everything was fixed. We got all of our things, loaded into my mom’s car, drove an hour to her house, got the kids in bed, and passed out. We woke up the next day and started what would turn out to be an absolutely lovely family vacation.
When I think back on that day, this contrast strikes me. At the end of a day of delays and frustrations I was a disaster - emotional, exhausted and empty. But the horribleness of the day ended. We got everyone safe and in bed and then it was over. Once we slept and started our vacation, the horrors of the day before began to fade away. We can even laugh about it now…mostly.
It makes me think about the moment we arrive at our eternal home. While life this side of heaven has plenty of joys and wonders, we live in a fallen world. There will forever be some version of delays, tantrums, messes to clean up, emotional distress, uncertainty, pain, grief, and hardship. There will be broken relationships, unmet expectations, and disappointments. Sometimes, it feels overwhelming and consuming and we wonder, “Is this nightmare ever going to end?”
The answer for believers is a glorious, completely certain YES!
Look at this picture with me:
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4
The moment our eternity in heaven begins, the pain we’ve known on earth, the tears we’ve shed in different seasons, the death we’ve walked through - all of the brokenness we’ve held in our hearts will be restored. But it won’t take a few days of recovery to start to get past the trials and hardships we’ve faced in life. It will be an instantaneous shift that lasts forever. Our future with our heavenly Father is glorious and perfect and brimming with hope.
And we don’t have to wait until we arrive on heaven’s shore before we can rest in the hope of the gospel! The hope we have in Jesus meets us right here, right now. It gives us strength when we are bone tired. It gives us grace when we feel like failures. It gives us peace when our plans don’t work out like we’d hoped. It gives us love when we are wounded and hurt. It gives us everything we need to press on towards our ultimate, complete, forever hope.
You may be walking through a nightmare of a season that may feel unending. Don’t lose heart. God has not left you. He has not forsaken you. He is walking with you now and forever until that long-awaited day when we see him face to face.
