of life, and death, and the life after death

The last thought I held in my mind as I fell asleep last night was that I just don't make any sense.

This isn't exactly a new revelation, just a thought that was confirmed in the light of some recent insights. Last night Zach and I went to see Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." The movie was pretty good, but definitely had it's faults which I won't get sidetracked into discussing here. But the point is, this movie brings up over and over the problem of aging, and death, and the fact that nothing ever lasts...

This got me thinking about, you guessed it, life, and death, and aging, and the sad reality that nothing on this earth lasts. And this is where I become confused and conflicted.

I believe in heaven, in redemption, in eternal life after this flawed existence, but for some reason, I still hang on to this life more dearly than I ever should. I feel like that truth that "nothing ever lasts" should come as a comfort, not a burden... This troubled life won't last forever; there is a new and perfect life to come. But it really doesn't. I don't know at what point in my life I stopped looking forward to heaven, but when I think about heaven now, I feel nothing. I have no dislike or fear of heaven, nothing that would ever make me not want to be there after this earthly life, but I don't have any desire for it either. It feels blasphemous to even say, but it's true.

I'm too attached to this life, too wrapped up in the beauty and tragedy of it all. It saddens and confuses me that we have the capacity to feel such pain and such passion in a life that is so temporary. It's not that I think this life is fantastic, or so purely happy that I just want to keep living forever. I am quite often hurt or jealous or unhappy. But all those moments of pain just make everything else more beautiful. And there is definitely a self-pitying component of my personality that doesn't mind any sort of suffering, because it just gives me an "excuse" to wallow, or lets me feel like my life is more dramatic than it actually is. Pathetic.

But this is where things start to get complicated... When I was a child, I used to pray that I would die before I got too old. I didn't want a long life. I was scared of being a very old person. The thought of having most of my life behind me scares me. So while I don't want to age, I also don't want this life to end.

It seems that what I like about this life is the combination and contrast of the happy and the sad. I appreciate the complexity; and at times I crave the drama. But what confuses me is that while I find a strange satisfaction in wallowing in unfortunate events, there are certain things in life that terrify me because they seem to involve quite a bit of pain or sadness. Marriage, for example. Obviously I haven't experienced it myself, but despite all the "happily ever after" goop I have been spoon fed by fairy tales, novels, and romantic comedies from age 2, I have seen enough examples of relationships gone bad (fictional and non) to leave me extremely pessimistic. I find myself asking, is marriage ever worth it? Didn't all those now divorced couples start out with the same emotions of love and optimism I feel now? In fact, sometimes my cowardice is so crippling I convince myself it would be better to never experience marriage, and therefore bypass any unnecessary risk of pain. But that seems to go against everything I've just said about myself, doesn't it?

What confuses me even more is that one of the reasons I'm skeptical about heaven is because, from my understanding of the scriptures, there will be no marriage in heaven. While the prospect of a temporary earthly marriage occasionally induces feelings of strong anxiety, the thought of no such eternal relationship deeply saddens me. What? How does this even make sense? The rate at which I switch back and forth between a hopeless romantic and a crippling pessimist baffles me. One moment I'm embracing life and everything about it, the next I want to shut myself off from any risk of feeling emotion. How does that work? And which is the true me?

At a point in the movie, as became a bit overwhelmed with sadness at Benjamin Button's predicament of growing younger while all those he loves are aging and dying, I remember thinking, "But this shouldn't bother me, I'm a Christian. I know that there's more than this life." But I couldn't help crying. I couldn't help feeling so burdened by the shortness of this earthly life, and sad that the reward of heaven is not as comforting as it should be.