The following column originally appeared in the April 22, 2000, issue.

Over the past three months I have received hundreds of letters and drawings from children extending their hands in welcome. They have offered prayers, good wishes, scriptural messages, and even advice. As you might surmise, a few of those homemade cards contained interesting variations on conventional greetings.
One piece of cream-colored construction paper from a child in Little Rock featured a large heart and this message written in crayon: “Love others as they love you.”
A fifth-grader in Memphis wrote this note: “Dear Bishop Sartain, once when we were in church and we were singing a song in Latin I thought it said ‘Are you staying Brother John you cannot leave us’ but my mom said that was not right. She told me to tell you.”
Another congratulatory note written in crayon was signed “Anonimus.” (I guess you can’t be too careful these days, especially when writing to a bishop — he might put you on a mailing list.)
One of my favorite greetings came from several second-graders at St. John in Hot Springs, who had apparently conferred with one another concerning the proper thing to say to a rookie bishop; each card ended with, “I hope you stay 5 years!”
When I told Father Jim West about these cards, he said, “I guess for a 7-year-old, 5 years are an eternity!” He was right.
The second graders were trying to tell me, in the most superlative of verbal expressions they could muster, that they wanted me to stay in Arkansas forever. When you’re 3 1/2-feet tall, still writing with thick pencils on primary notebook paper, and you stand on your tip-toes to look over the horizon of life as it stretches endlessly before you, “5 years” means “forever.”
It was the “forever” sentiment of their message that struck me the most. Don’t we all wish and pray for “forevers” of happiness for those we love? We pray that illness and sadness will be short-lived (“Get well soon!”) so that birthdays and blessings will have no end (“… and many more!”). To care about someone’s “forever” is to love them deeply.
You and I were created for a “forever” of unity with God. It’s the destiny he set before us when time began. It’s what we long for, whether we’re conscious of it or not. It’s the reason God has given humanity grace after grace, revelation after revelation, chance after chance. He wants us to stay with him forever.
We often let our immediate wants cloud our eternal needs. Maybe we lie to wiggle out of the momentary embarrassment of a mistake; maybe we gossip to bolster our image while damaging another’s; maybe we seek short-term gratification in any number of ways, forgetting that short-term pleasures often have long-term ramifications. That’s part of Satan’s seduction: he tempts us to forget the blessed “forever” for which we were made, preferring to focus our attention on immediate wants and desires — as if the here-and-now is the ultimate destiny we can hope for, as if there’s nothing beyond today.
But the Lord Jesus came to give eternity back to us through his death and resurrection, to make clear beyond a shadow of a doubt the destiny for which his heavenly father created us.
I’ve always been fascinated with the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus. St. John relates that when Jesus saw Lazarus’ sister and the others weeping, “he became perturbed and deeply troubled … and wept.” (John 11) One Scripture scholar suggests that Jesus wept not only out of grief for his dead friend, but also because he shuddered at the very fact of death, which had entered the world because of sin.
Jesus came to restore life, to undo the damage caused by sin, to put an end to death’s hold on us, to make crystal clear the “forever” awaiting us — the “forever” that already belongs to those who follow him. St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, “… seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3)
In time of temptation, a good question to ask ourselves is this: “Is my heart set on now — or forever?”
Christian faith does not assert that “now” is unimportant. To the contrary, now is very important! Faith gives us the insight that the best way to understand now, and the best way to live now, is to do so in view of our eternal destiny — that for which we are made. Forever sheds light on today, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ re-opened the door to that destiny. Take a few moments to read 1 Corinthians 15.
May you be blessed with the vision of my 7-year-old pen pals, who know “by heart” what “forever” means, even if they don’t always get the words right.
Do you have an intention for Bishop Sartain’s prayer? If so, send it to him at Bishop Sartain’s Prayer List, Diocese of Little Rock, 2500 North Tyler St., P.O. Box 7239, Little Rock, AR 72217.