Father Thomas McKenzie died on Monday, August 23^rd, along with his 22-year-old daughter. They were just out of Nashville, headed southwest with an aim to stay the night in Shamrock, TX when they collided with a tractor-trailer. The finality and the suddenness of it hit me deeply. I remembered that when I was struggling in ministry five years ago, flirting hard with Anglicanism, Father Thomas took the time to answer the Twitter messages of a guy he’d never met. I appreciated his generosity.

The older I get and the bigger my circle of family and friends becomes, I find that my capacity for love grows. Having never gotten over the selfishness I was born with, I can attribute this increase of love to God’s grace alone. But despite all the reasons (and they’re mostly people) that I want to keep living, I feel like Death keeps breathing down the back of my neck.

There have been times when I’ve woken up with just a tinge of disappointment that I was still alive. That longing to go has never coincided with my darker moments. There’s a difference between wanting change to start and wanting monotony to end. Those of us who have fought black thoughts about prematurely closing the door on life know that we are rarely (if ever) motivated by hope. Rather, we’re searching desperately for relief and just have trouble seeing the light.

The infrequent and slight morning disappointment that I’m still here has absolutely nothing to do with the current status quo. I’m not looking to fly away, o glory. I don’t want to leave my family and friends and this world that I call home. It’s a restlessness, do you see? It’s a homesickness. It’s like when you try so hard to remember a beautiful dream that keeps popping away just when you reach it. But, in this case, the dream is actually a memory, and it’s one that I can’t wait to see it again.

The apostle Paul is a helpful example for when I try to understand this antsy energy in myself. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul compares our bodies to tents. Tents wear out over time. They rip and they sag, and they let the water in where they shouldn’t. Tents serve their good purpose, but they’re supposed to be temporary. For all in tents and purposes, they’re not supposed to permanently live in them.

For Paul, his desire wasn’t that he wanted to escape his tent. He didn’t want to be free from the confines of a body. He wanted more of a body. His burden (according to verse 4) was not to be unclothed, but to be further clothed. He hung his hope on the certainty that one day “what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” Death may breathe down my neck, but Life is breathing down Death’s neck and every day, it creeps closer to with irresistible purpose. Resurrection wins. New life, new bodies – the lingering delay of that reality is what saddens me just a little (at least, when I’m mindful of its absence).

I don’t long for some rapture in which I fly to the sky with Jesus by and by. I am not yearning for the destruction of the earth in some terrible tribulation that has more to do with best-selling fiction than the story told by Scripture. And while heaven is glorious and I cannot wait to be there, I know that heaven is not the last stop. Our telos, our goal and aim, is the unification of heaven and earth.

One day, the bodies of Father Thomas and his daughter will be resurrected to reunite with their spirits. Their spirits are immediately, right now, in the presence of Christ because of their faith in Christ. One day, the body of my grandmom, Mary Kay, will be resurrected to reunite with her spirit that is now with Christ. And one day, my body will sprout like a seedling from my grave and my spirit will be further clothed with a corpse that has been swallowed up and remade by life.

When my perspective is correct (and it is so often askew), that’s what I’m quietly waiting for. For the believer in Jesus, to long for death is to long for life. It’s not that we can’t wait to leave everyone else behind. It’s that we can’t wait to begin the wedding feast of the Lamb with everyone else! We can’t wait to drink the wine of the kingdom come on a restored earth in restored bodies. We can’t wait for the permanent banishment of sorrowful tears and longing lament. Maranatha.