Birthday hopes

It's Jen's birthday today - she would have been 41 (in her prime, as a mathematician would say). I've included a photo from her 40th birthday last year. She always refused to have parties even for significant birthdays, although she did have a 21st party (long before I knew her). I've also put in one from March 2007 BC (before cancer).

Since I read Tom Wright's book "Surprised by Hope", I've been mulling over a central promise of Christian belief, that there is indeed a life beyond in a fully physical sense, in a resurrected body, not merely some ethereal harp-playing otherness. Wright calls it "Life after life after death". Of course the details of that new existence are only sketched out, but we will at least carry our identities and histories in some recognisable way.

So if Christianity is true, and I hold to it, then I get to see Jen again, not as she was in last illness, but in a transformed and perfected way. As Nicholas Wolterstorff says in his book 'Lament for a Son', "When I say my first words to Eric, then God's reign will be here". I'll most likely be waiting until my death, so it could be decades away. Even though I want it now, that hope matters. If Christianity is not true, then I've said goodbye to Jen forever. I've never felt the contrast between those positions as strongly and emotionally as that before. Jen wasn't scared of dying because she shared that same hope. So my birthday wish is for the end of the world.

In July Jen bought the CD "Curioser" by Kate Miller-Heidke. It contains the track "Last Day on Earth", which is oddly appropriate:

It's the last day on earth
In my dreams
It's the end of the world
And you've come back to me
In my dreams