Evanescent — Vanishing Like the Fading Flowers

Evanescent (adj.) vanishing quickly like the fading flowers.

Imagine you were born a comet at the very beginning of time.

You are in a sea of a thousand nights, among the fish of a thousand stars. The first thing you hear at the dawn of the cosmos is the song of creation that sung you into being. The first thing you see are the glittering stars. The first thing you love is the light.

Like a sailor who’d lost his way home, you burn aimlessly through a shadowed sea, marveling at the marvels of the universe. You behold the glories of the towering nebulae, robed in lucent gold, red, and white. You behold the stories of the star-studded sky, written in wonder by diamond-smith angels in constellations of living light. You behold the beautiful earth, a mote of dust on the face of eternity, a fleck of gold in a sea of darkness.

For thousands of nights and thousands of days you wander. And then one day, you see the Sun, and you fall in love. She gleams in the distant dark like melted gold, like love, like God Himself. And your soul is flooded with joy.

And a thousand years and a thousand more you dance together in the night, gleaming and whirling like two fireflies in the yawning gloom of a twilight sky. With every revolution, your fire and ice melts into nothing, and she gleams a little less bright, until your body, once the flame of an infinite star, is the fire of a flickering candle.

You whirl around her one more time, closer to her glory and beauty than ever before, until in the embrace of her outstretched sunbeams, you flicker out.

“All flesh is as grass,
And all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.
The grass withers,
And its flower falls away,
But the word of the Lord endures forever.”

—1 Peter 1:24b–24a

I was on the road on Thursday, when I saw a pretty girl in a Porsche.

I was stopped at an intersection. The sun gleamed off the sleek convertible’s silver gray and her breeze-blown gold hair as she rolled into view, a perfect sunlit flower floating in the current of a metallic river. For one moment, she was there. For the next, she was not.

Our life here on this beautiful, green earth is like that. At best, it can be a thing of marvel and radiance, but even so, it fades. Like a comet, our life bursts into existence in fire and strength and beauty and glory, only to fade into nothing in the end. For a moment it is there. For the next, it is not.

It seems odd, doesn’t it, that life should ever end? We feel as though it should go on forever. We have always felt that it should. We experience the glory of loving and being loved, of tasting the summer sky, or feeling the warm sunbeams refracted on a glittering sea, and we don’t want it to end. We want to bathe in the splendor of the world for forever and eternity. We want to live happily ever after.

The reason we don’t think happiness should end, of course, is because it isn’t meant to.

The beauty of this earth is fading away. But that isn’t a cause for despair. It is “only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”1

And we will visit that country someday, if we trust ourselves to the One who is Eternity itself and strive to live a life that is beautiful—a life that reflects the glory of God as the moon reflects the sun. For the world is passing away, and the lust of it. But he who does the will of God abides forever.

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