A Thing Isn’t Beautiful Because It Lasts

“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts” - Vision from Avengers: Age of Ultron. We’re often convinced that if we can get life set up just right - if we have the right job or the right spouse or the right neighborhood or the right level of obedience - then we can coast at that same level of rightness indefinitely. But God didn’t send us down to this earth so we could be tested until we got our 401K set up, or got called to be the gospel doctrine teacher, or our kids all graduated from college. God sent us to be tested up until the moment of our death, and the tests will carry on far beyond that as well. If our eventual goal is to become like God, it’s not like even then the tests will stop. How much do each and every one of us test God’s patience on a daily basis? Our lives aren’t beautiful because nothing ever comes along to upset the balance. Our lives are going to swing back and forth between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and painful, peaceful and chaotic. And when the good and the beautiful and the peaceful and the pleasant moments give way to evil and ugliness and chaos and pain, it’s not as though they never happened, and it’s not as though they will not come again. We are eternal souls who have been placed momentarily into a realm of time, a place of beginnings and endings. Because our Father is eternal, we are constantly thinking that each new experience will last forever. But God sent us down here to learn about time, about beginnings and endings, about change. Just like we have to learn to walk before we can run, we have to learn how to deal with time before we can learn to deal with eternity. We have to master the ends before we are ready for the endless. We have to learn to appreciate the beauty in the moment before we are ready to enjoy the beauty outside the moment. In this life all good things come to an end. And all bad things come to an end. Boring things, exciting things, terrible things, wonderful things, they all come to an end. We are children of an Eternal Father. We don’t like when things end. Even when bad things end, we can feel anxious and uneasy because as bad as they were, at least we were used to them and knew what to expect. But God is trying to get us ready for eternity. If we’re upset when something we’ve grown to love for years or decades is suddenly gone, imagine how we’ll feel in eternity when we see whole galaxies burst into life and then snuff out over billions of years in barely more than a blink of the eye when compared with the endless stretch of eternity. God rejoices when we choose the right, not because He knows we’ll never sin again. He loves when we create something beautiful not because that beauty will never fade or tarnish. God loves goodness for goodness’ sake. He loves beauty because it is beautiful. God doesn’t think about forever, He only thinks about right now. All times are present before Him. There is no now or later, no before or after. The good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful are there before Him always. We’re practicing on one timeline right now, but one day we will be able to see all of the timelines woven together in an eternal tapestry.