Senior Pastor Joel Eidsness of Walnut Hill Community Church
in Bethel, Connecticut, once took his seven-year-old daughter
on an unusual date. They visited the town dump. Backing
up his car against the mound of refuse, he placed his daughter
on the roof, and, with pencil and paper, they began listing
all the items they could identify. There were Barbie dolls,
bicycle frames, skateboards, play refrigerators and stoves,
radios, televisions--everything that a young girl dreams
of and more.
Returning home, they pulled alongside a trailer truck, piled
high with hunks of scrap cars that been crushed. He leaned
over to his daughter and reminded her that the beautiful
car they were riding in would someday end up in a scrap
heap like that.
He later wrote, “That was a day Kristen and I will
never forget. It was a powerful reminder that someday everything
we own will be junk. In city dumps the things that have
captivated our attention and dominated our lives will smolder
beneath a simmering flame, amidst stinking mounds of rotting
garbage. But the picture portrays not only the end of our
lives and that of our children. It also portrays the ultimate
collapse of human history as we now know it. History is
not destined to grind on forever. It awaits—wittingly
or unwittingly—the awesome and terrible judgment of
God.”
