Have you ever wondered about the brand Everlast on professional boxing shorts? I’ve always heard that getting your head walloped on a regular basis doesn’t necessarily make for a long life; at least it’s not good for one’s brain cells. Just think of the contradiction of two guys in Everlast shorts trying to kill each other. But our lives are marked the same contradiction. This human life is fragile and it beats us up continually, but we walk around, nonetheless, with Everlast stamped on us.

The wise King Solomon once wrote: “He [God} has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people can’t see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT). In other words, it seems God has purposely frustrated us. He made us with a capacity for eternal things yet kept us from the full knowledge of what He is up to. And why would He do that unless He wanted us to seek after Him and perhaps find Him? (Acts 17:27)

Could this not be a good way to describe a great deal of human frustration? We have this hunch we were made for more than just this life, so we are continuously reaching for something we can’t define. Our intuitive curiosities are more inclined to reach into this unknown than our minds are capable of understanding it. Yet the grand quest continues. Could not this search for meaning prove that meaning exists?

Years ago, Joni Mitchell expressed this in her song about Woodstock. “We are stardust (million year-old carbon), we are golden (caught in the devil’s bargain), and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” We wouldn’t look for something we never had, or never knew existed. You can only miss something you once had.

When it comes to eternity, we have to either go on faith, guess, or just take our chances on what’s next after this life. If we choose to accept the Bible’s perspective, however, a much more encouraging picture unfolds. Our never ending life is the most wonderful thing about us: God made us to be His friends forever. We are not a discarded accident or a failed experiment. We have great beauty and value to God, so much so that He rescued us from the trash heap of where our lives were going and adopted us as sons and daughters into His family to live with Him forever. So why do we wrestle with this? Maybe it’s just too good to be true.

Well, it’s the old “bird in the hand” thing, don’t you think? We’ve got a hold of this life; we know so very little about the next. Some of us aren’t even sure this one exists, much less, the next. The rest of us don’t know what it’s going to be, even if we believe in it. It’s purely a faith issue. You come to know about eternity in the same way you come to know about God: you step out and believe it and something deep inside confirms your move. But believing what you don’t see can make you look silly. It stretches you considerably.

In the Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Last Crusade, when Harrison Ford goes after the Holy Grail, there is a test when he has to take a step of faith. He has to cross a gorge over what appears to be a bottomless pit in order to claim the Grail so he can heal his father from a fatal wound. The riddle he and his father have figured out has convinced him he must take a step out into nothing—has to put his full weight into it—and as he does, sure enough, a bridge appears out of nowhere and his step lands on something solid that was not visible until the instant his foot came down on it in mid-air. All issues of faith are like this. It’s not enough to believe, you have to put your whole weight into it. And when you do, you risk falling, but you find something solid.

This question also has to do with the reality of what’s immediate. Our lives are too full of the here and now to take on eternity as well. Thinking about eternity is not going to put food on my table and a roof over my head. To this, Jesus would say: “So don’t worry about having enough food or drink or clothing. Why be like [those who do not believe in me]…who are so deeply concerned about these things? Your heavenly Father already knows all your needs, and He will give you all you need from day to day if you live for Him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern” (Matthew 6:31-33).

God wants us to make the Kingdom of God our concern more than our daily needs. But this doesn’t mean we walk around with our heads in he clouds—too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good. This means these things are connected. We balance our earthly concerns with heavenly values. An eternal viewpoint helps us make better choices about what we do with our day-to-day existence. In other words, it is possible to be heavenly minded and up to a lot of earthly good in the process. That would certainly describe Jesus. An eternal viewpoint doesn’t make us less responsible on earth; it makes us more responsible for what really counts.

Reading the Bible on a regular basis is one thing you can do to prepare for eternity. Eternity is a continual reality in the Bible. You can’t read it without getting a bigger perspective on life—even if you only consider the fact of how old and yet how relevant it is. The Bible is, among other things, a book of history that has much to say about those who have gone before, believing the same things that we believe today, and those who will live into the future as well.

In the Bible, God is constantly interacting in human history, which is a way in which eternity keeps coming to bear on our situation. God enters our world in space and time out of his place in eternity, and makes us more conscious of eternal things in the process.

Prayer is another way. It ties you with the eternal. The unseen world—what Christ called the kingdom of God—comes alive when we pray.

And attending church or some fellowship group on a regular basis will help remind you of a perspective that is easy to forget when we are drowning in our daily routine of jobs and responsibilities. Other people who believe the reality of eternity will help us keep eternity in mind.

Any time spent with books or people who believe in the reality of eternity will help balance out a worldly viewpoint that concerns itself only with what is happening right now.

Our life on earth is such a short time compared to our forever. We need to be better at weighing the significance of these things. Everything connected to this earth that seems so important right now will seem so small when faced with eternity. We will find that all these immediate experiences we can see and feel are windows into something more permanent and whole. If this life is real, the next one will be even more so.

2 Peter 3:8-10 Why God waits to return.

2 Peter 3:11-15 How we should live in the meantime.

Matthew 6:19-34 Weighing earthly concerns and eternal values.