Temporarily Permanent

If you ever visit the par­son­age, you will notice that my décor is a bit sim­ple. Peo­ple tease me about camp­ing out there. I even have a lit­tle more fur­ni­ture in this dwelling than in the last. For sev­eral years I slept on an army cot. Yes, I am a bit more min­i­mal­ist than most, but there are a num­ber of rea­sons for that. I take a cue from the Exo­dus. It was forty years of camp­ing out before the Old Tes­ta­ment peo­ple of God received their home­land. I have always seen this life as very tem­po­rary. My home­land is yet to come.
From the start, Amer­ica has been a nation of pil­grims (even the native Amer­i­cans drifted here from some­where else). This is a coun­try in which peo­ple do a lot of mov­ing. That is one rea­son the nation is so dynamic. Migra­tion, immi­gra­tion, trans­mi­gra­tion — the terms all indi­cate that some­thing tem­porar­ily per­ma­nent is hap­pen­ing.
Our tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments hap­pen so quickly that they have to be “frozen” so the mar­ket­ing and con­sump­tion cycle can catch up (it is basi­cally a two year cycle). The com­puter on my desk is tem­porar­ily per­ma­nent. It is here long enough to do its job. The same holds for my auto­mo­bile. I refer to things like they are per­ma­nently mine, but that is only an effi­ciency of the mind.
Jesus was here phys­i­cally for about thirty-three years — yet some­how he is still here. In that sense, he is the most tem­porar­ily per­ma­nent being ever (espe­cially when you con­sider his pre-incarnation). It is mind bog­gling. Peo­ple that have gone before us are still some­how around in our very being. Every­thing they ever did some­how affects us now.
Paul referred to our bod­ies as a tent. My tent is show­ing some wear and tear. Some of it is from the moves, some of it from the high winds of social and eco­nomic change. Life is a trip — a camp­ing trip! Yet, in this tem­po­rary body we sense an eter­nal per­ma­nence. Absolute per­ma­nence is yet to come.