The Library

There comes a question that refuses to leave the human heart alone. It often begins quietly, maybe in a moment of fatigue or wonder, and it grows heavier as time moves forward. If everything ends in God’s hands, if eternity is secure and grace has already written the conclusion, then what is the point of living through all of this? Why keep turning the pages when the ending is already perfect?

Eternity can be imagined as two great bookends. One stands before time, the other beyond it. Between them are the books of our lives, filled with years and choices and the strange mixture of beauty and ache that makes up being human. Bookends on their own are decorative but empty. They hold no meaning until they hold stories. The same is true for creation. For this world, the bookends of eternity find their purpose only through the living stories unfolding between them.

David wrote of this mystery when he said, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139:16) Even before you began, every chapter of your story was already known to God. Yet He still invites you to live it with Him, to walk through every page as it unfolds in time.

The middle, the part called life, is not here to prove something to God or to earn a grade at the end. It exists because of what God desires most. What He wanted was not a flawless army of eternal beings who serve Him mechanically. He wanted relationship. He wanted a friendship that could choose Him, not simply exist near Him. Love cannot exist without freedom, and freedom cannot exist without time. Time is what gives love its texture, its depth, its honesty. It is the space where trust becomes real.

Without this middle ground, love would remain theoretical. You could be perfect but not personal, obedient but not intimate. By placing you inside time, God gave you the capacity to love or not love, to trust or not trust, to know Him or ignore Him. In this way, your life becomes the living story of how you and God come to know each other. Every choice, every act of trust, every return after failure is a paragraph in that story. The struggle is not an interruption to God’s plan. It is the very arena where love learns its endurance.

Paul echoes this same truth when he writes, “You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Corinthians 3:3) Your life is a living letter, one of many that make up your book, a letter being written by God Himself, each line shaped by His Spirit as you learn to walk with Him.

The purpose of living is not to become someone God can finally tolerate. The purpose is to walk with Him through your own story while it is still being written. He does not desire you to be a flawless creation admiring from a distance. He made you to be a companion, a son or daughter, a friend. What He desires most is to be known by you and to share Himself in return. Time makes this possible. It allows a relationship to unfold, not all at once, but through seasons and turning points, through waiting and returning and learning to see.

If you were only an eternal being, you would never change. You would never grow in awareness or in love. But here, within the limits of time, you are given the sacred opportunity to learn who He is. When you fall and are lifted again, you discover His mercy. When you wait in uncertainty and He remains faithful, you discover His trustworthiness. When you love another person and it costs you something, you discover what His own heart is like. This is the communion that time makes possible. It is the kind of knowing that eternity alone could not teach.

The life you are living is one of the volumes between the bookends of eternity. Every page matters. The meaning is not found in reaching the last chapter, but in the relationship being written throughout the pages. The question is never whether the story will end well. That ending was sealed long before your first breath. The question is how much of that eternal love will find expression in you while the story unfolds.

Without the books, these bookends would still stand, but they would be silent. While you live, your library comes alive. So it is with God and humanity. The space between eternity’s bookends is the library of relationship, the living record of how love and freedom learn to walk together. That is the point of living. That is what this world was made for, not to pass a test, but to write a story of friendship between God and the ones He calls His own, you.

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human mind has conceived the things God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

and this.. this is something no other creature was ever created to have.