Beyond the Darkness Devotional | Encouragement in GriefSýnishorn

Carpe Aeternum

Before your person died, you may have engaged in conversations about your mortality with a sense of glibness. When a friend asked, “What would you want to do if you knew you’d die tomorrow?” you could think of a laundry list to fill the time—Starbucks with a friend, a trip to Venice, a ride on the world’s largest roller coaster. Chances are, the items that filled your imaginary bucket list were a mix of the mundane and the extraordinary. If you knew your time was short, you’d want to make the most of it. You’d want to fill the moments with love and warmth and thrills and delight. You’d want to carpe diem, seize the day.

Now that you live with grief, you may not like entertaining thoughts of your own mortality. You’ve seen what it looks like to have a loved one granted a finite amount of time. You’ve had to wrestle with how to help your person spend their last days or hours. You know that the idea of seizing the day, while exciting, can sometimes be engulfed in life’s harder realities. To give you energizing hope in grief, you need something more than seizing the day.

After the people of Judah were in Babylonian exile for many years, God anointed Jeremiah to prophesy about the rebuilding of Jerusalem. For those who had wept when they remembered Zion (see Psalm 137:1), Jeremiah’s news brought a thrill of hope. After so much sorrow in exile, the moment Israel longed for was finally approaching. When, years later, Nehemiah guided Israel in the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall, the people worked with vigor to realize their long-held dreams. This was the moment, their finest hour! Or was it?

Years before Israel’s dream was ever realized, Jeremiah knew that while seizing the day might give the people initial energy for the tasks that faced them, they’d need a stronger power for the long haul. Rather than fix their eyes only on what lay before them, the people would need to bind themselves to God with an everlasting covenant. They’d need to live with eternity in mind. This perspective would undergird them on days when their carpe diem energy kicked in. It would also sustain them on days when the task seemed long and monotonous. To live fully again, Israel would need to grasp hold of and delight in God’s eternal plan for them. They’d need to carpe aeternum—seize eternity—instead.

As you move and live with grief, as you “start back home” toward a new life after loss, God invites you to seize eternity too. Yes, learn to take pleasure in this day and all it offers. But more than that, cling to the reality that these “light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17, NIV). You can live with grief and thrive after loss because God has bound himself to you in love, an eternal covenant that fuels your work today and will carry you forward into the good future he has planned for you.