Anyone who knows me well will know that I have a completely irrational, dreadful phobia about and terrible reaction to injections. Always have had, ever since I was a kid. This afternoon I have to have one. Its all absolutely routine, but the anticipation is very unpleasant because I know what is coming.
I have recently written a fair bit here about longing for God, the sweetness of salvation, the sheer heady delight of knowing security in Christ and about an eternal home with God in Heaven. The anticipation makes it even better, like the aroma of a delicious meal that gets the appetite going before the experience.
But the opposite shuld also be true: the anticipation of people spending eternity condemned should have a great galvanising effect on Christians because of the horror of what is coming, a future in the presence of God but - terribly - without a mediator.
I am sitting here feeling a total wimp because I am quaking, feeling nauseous and a bit faint, at the thought of an unpleasant injection coming. It is a tiny, tiny shadow of how I ought to feel about judgment coming on the unsaved. The interesting thing for me this morning is how strongly I FEEL about something bad, as opposed to how I mentally process it. Logically I tell myself that an injection isn't that bad at all, that people have them all the time and that it doesn't hurt. It makes no difference.
Logically I tell myself that judgement is, for the non-Christian, VERY VERY TERRIBLE, but a lot of the time I don't feel the strength of it. Perhaps this means I don't feel very much at all, perhaps it means that my feelings are set by my fallenness to all the wrong things.
Just for today I am finding that as fasting and praying increases longing for God in a sweet way, so the anticipation of later this afternoon increases my longing for many to find salvation and avoid condemnation is similarly heightened.
It turns out that blogging about it doesn't make me feel any better. Shame, I thought it might. Just goes to show the limitations of the internet...!