Forever
In the cars of my youth how I tore through those sand dunes, and cut up my tires on those oyster shell roads . . .
It’s a slice of personal history from Texas singer/songwriter Guy Clark in his song, “The South Coast of Texas.” I didn’t grow up on the Texas Gulf coast like Clark, but I’ve spent enough time there to know something about oyster shell roads. And in my mind those roads always lead me to Easter.
My grandparents lived in Orange near where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, and we always were there for the Easter holiday and a week or two in the summer. They lived in a modest house with a back driveway and alley paved with crushed oyster shells. It was hot and dusty and the shells were sharp enough to cut up the soles of our bare feet if we weren’t wearing our Keds. We’d play out there with a red wagon on the driveway and the wheels would get bogged down in the shells and we’d have to gang up and help push or pull depending on what we were hauling.
Those memories have come back around in recent days as I’ve watched our neighbors’ grandchildren playing on their gravel driveway. They come rolling down the sidewalk on their little bicycles with training wheels and then come to a grinding, crunching halt as soon as they hit the gravel. Like us, they get stuck and they try to pedal their way out or they get off and push. Then eventually they abandon the bikes in the driveway and move on to something else.
I watch them and think about Easter in Orange, and in my mind I hear the end of Guy Clark’s verse:
But nothing is forever say the old men in the shipyards, turning trees into shrimp boats well I guess they ought to know.
It’s true that the sunlit days of pulling red wagons down oyster shell drives didn’t last forever, nor the innocence and endless possibilities they held. As I’ve written previously, my sister left this life on one of those Easter weeks. And a year ago in May both Guy Clark and the grandmother of those children next door passed on. But gone forever? Not hardly. Even the trees Clark sang about were turned into shrimp boats. That’s not an ending; that’s a transformation toward the next phase of forever.
We spend a lot of time on the way to Easter talking about new beginnings and fresh starts, but sometimes we get dangerously close to turning Easter into nothing more than a springtime celebration of new life – from the gorgeous blooms at the Arboretum to the new baby giraffe at the zoo. Certainly there is a symbolic connection to Easter, but that is just a trick of the calendar. Easter is not a springtime festival. Easter is about new life that is ours for all seasons and all times. Today, tomorrow, forever.
We also come close in our theology to downplaying the key message of Easter. We acknowledge that God became human in the person of Jesus and showed us a better way to live and then suffered and died for our sins and was resurrected and now is one with God in heaven. But we have trouble putting ourselves into the rest of the story: we too will live forever with God and Jesus in heaven.
Perhaps we downplay the “forever” factor because it is too fantastic to truly accept; something in us sort of doubts it. Or maybe we take it for granted, especially those of us who enjoy comfortable lives. We can have it so good in this life that we don’t give much thought to what comes next.
But “forever” is the real news of Easter. Through the unfathomable love of a God we can neither see nor comprehend, we have eternal life. Not just a life that continues in someone else’s memory of us, or in the children we bring into the world to carry on what we’ve taught them, or the legacies we leave behind through our careers and our vocations. No, we’re talking about real life that we will experience with God and with each other forever.
That means that someday I will once again see my grandparents and sister and others I have loved and have not seen in a long, long time. And the children next door will see their grandmother. And I may even finally get to meet Guy Clark in person and tell him how much I enjoy his music. And maybe we’ll talk about his song and he’ll say, “I was wrong. Some things are forever.”