I will never eat a Chick-Fil-A spicy chicken biscuit again. Ever.
One Friday morning back in 2013, I swung through the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru before heading to the Tampa middle school where I volunteered. As our group meeting went on that morning, I started to feel tired, so when I left the school around 10am, I went straight back to my apartment and took a quick nap. Seven hours later, I woke up suddenly as my stomach gave a violent lurch. Pulling myself up from the sweat-soaked couch, I rushed to the bathroom and threw up. I grabbed a thermometer and discovered my temperature was hovering around 101. After I called a few people from my church, a nurse friend of mine stopped by with gatorades, ice cream, and a couple of pill bottles. With my stomach still grumbling, I cued up Netflix and settled in for however long this was going to take.
As the days went by, my condition didn’t improve. My temperature stayed over 100, and it became gradually harder to hold anything solid in my stomach. You know it’s bad when even ice cream seems like too much! Instead, I subsisted on water and gatorade and made frequent trips to the bathroom. On day four, even swallowing a Tylenol capsule made me throw up, so my pastor came over and drove me to a freestanding urgent care clinic. I blearily accepted the anti-nausea medication, returned home to the couch, and settled back in. For the record, I have no memory of what I watched on Netflix that week; I just remember using Netflix binges as a general numbing agent.
As I entered day six of food poisoning, now 15 pounds lighter and still running a fever, I began to wonder, “Holy crap, am I going to die from this? Like, are they going to break down my door after no one hears from me for a week and find me lying on this couch surrounded by empty Gatorade bottles and an ‘Are you still watching…’ message on Netflix? Should I leave some instructions?” I reached across the coffee table for a pad of post-it notes and scribbled down some thoughts:
– Give my books to anyone who has room for them.
– Give my guitars to the church youth group.
– Do NOT play a slow, mournful version of “Amazing Grace” at my funeral, or I will sit up and protest.
– Put “This will be funny later” on my grave marker.
This will be funny later?
Once the fever subsided and I was able to eat half a bowl of mac and cheese again, the note struck me as a little odd. I mean, sure, there was the immediate comedy of my proposed obituary title (“Local Youth Minister Murdered by Chicken Biscuit“), but I guess when you study the New Testament closely, death does take on a certain distant humor.
In Matthew 20, Jesus told a parable about a team of workers who, though they came to work in a vineyard at different times throughout the day, all received the same payment at the end: the standard amount for an entire day’s work. Some of the workers were upset, but the landowner explained they all received exactly what they had been promised. There’s a certain humor to the story when we think of the “landowner” as God and the “pay” as eternal life. Since there is no greater quantity than eternity, the idea of one worker getting “more” eternity than another becomes laughable. If one person comes to faith later in life than another, who cares? There is eternity to look forward to.
When we examine our own day-to-day experiences through an eternity-centered lens, the things which upset us in the here-and-now become a little trivial— maybe even a little funny. Life’s daily frustrations barely register on the radar when considered across the span of an eternal life (or so my biscuit-addled brain thought), so maybe there really is something there. It’s oddly liberating to think of daily annoyances as cosmically small, and perhaps such a worldview gives us license to focus on the things which really matter to us— issues like love and peace and justice which echo into eternity.
If this life really is infinitesimal in the face of eternity, this frees us up to spend our lives fighting for differences we really care about. We’re free to focus on the things which matter to us, trusting in the idea that even the greatest frustrations we encounter will be funny later, even if “later” lies on the other side of eternity.