Always or Never

I recently received an email from an Asian fellow who was encouraging me to contact him if I never received the item he sent me. He was trying very hard but his English needed quite a bit of work. At one point he wrote. "If you do not always receive it, please be contacting me." Learning a new language must be difficult (I have not at this point) because words can have similar concepts but diametrically opposed meanings. Such as in this case, he should have used never not always, these words have the same concept of universality but their meanings are a mirror image of one another. If we think about it we can see how this guy made the mistake.

I have also pondered the ideas of eternity and infinity. eternity has the idea of time and infinity of numerals or amounts yet I do not think that either are true. Infinity is not a number it is the opposite, it is the concept of being innumerable and inexhaustible. One writer explained it this way; If you had a library with an infinite number of red books and an infinite number of blue books and you went in and checked out half of the blue books, the total number of books in the library would not decrease. There is just no end to the number of books.

Applying this perspective to eternity, particularly in terms of heaven and hell, and it can suddenly overwhelm us. When I was young I would try to conceive of being with the Lord without end. I think finitely, there is always an end to whatever I do! So to try to grasp eternity was a challenge that would overwhelm me emotionally and I would have to stop thinking about it! John Newton wrote: When we've been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun. We've no less days to sing God's praise then when we've first begun. Newton understood the idea of eternity. After 10,000 years we will still have all of eternity to be with our Lord!