October 9th, 2015
On one of the Saturday worship trainings, we meditated on and worshipped about the Stage of Christ. The two kinds of stages that I’ve been on a few times for awards came to my mind…my school graduations and also monthly award assemblies in high school. My graduations were all boring and un-special. Everyone received more or less the same meaningless treatment…you just waited for a long time for your turn and then went up, shook hands, snapped a picture with someone you didn’t know, and walked down to wait some more until it was all done. In university, I graduated mostly with people I didn’t know. My high school graduation was the worst…my mom asked me at the end why I didn’t get to stand up for those five seconds with the Ontario Scholars (I was one mark off from getting an 80% overall average to get it). It didn’t matter to her that I had received a $1000 award during the ceremony!
Then, for the monthly assemblies in my previous high school, I used to get so many awards…at least a third of them for my grade were mine. People used to joke that I should just stay up on stage rather than going back to my seat, because my name would be called again. But instead of a sense of pride and accomplishment, I felt a bit of embarrassment, because I knew many were jealous of me and not really congratulating me from the heart. In the end, all those paper awards and medals just collected dust in storage. They didn’t mean anything in the long run.
But in the Stage of Christ, it will be so special. The Lord will personally be there to appreciate me. I pictured a huge screen replaying things I had done on the earth for the Lord and for brothers and sisters. I will be so touched at seeing how much I’ve done and likely forgotten. And the Lord Himself will be so touched to see my love for Him all these years. Violin said maybe there will be people coming on the stage to thank me, and I was so moved to think of how proud the Lord will feel for me. Leanne prayed that brothers and sisters will cheer for me from the heart; Jesse said, they won’t just be giving polite applause, and I realized it won’t be jealous applause either. It’ll be people who know me from my own “team”, as Violin said, cheering proudly and joyfully. How special!! But, really, whatever we imagine, we know the actual moment will be beyond anything we’ve imagined or experienced in our lives on earth. This is the reality we look forward to! What we do on earth out of love for God truly is never forgotten by Him.