Toilet Paper Illustration

I've been thinking of this illustration for a couple of days, so I decided to blog it. I thought the service at my church this past Sunday was very powerful. They always are, it's an awesome church, but this past Sunday was filled with even more emotion. You see, one of our missionary families lost a child last week. The Ochoa family moved to Uganda in 2005, and last week their 16 year old daughter became ill with cerebral malaria and died a few days later. Just too sad. It doesn't seem fair. The thing is, is that God does let people die, and we don't understand it all. But the point of his sermon was this ..."For Christ followers, the end of life on earth is not the end of life." Here's the illustration...he held the end of a roll of toilet paper and then rolled the rest of it down the aisle. Reading this isn't quite as powerful as seeing it, but picture a very long aisle...or picture the size of Wal-Mart, anything big. Even after he had rolled the roll of toilet paper down the aisle, there was still alot of the roll left. He held the first panel and said that our life here on earth is the very first panel, and the rest of the roll is eternity! We often live as though that first panel is all we've got, when to God that is just a breath. Talitha made the most of her "panel". Those who knew her said she had a zeal for life and was totally sold out to Jesus. She was looking towards eternity, sharing Jesus' love with the children in Uganda...and now she is in the arms of her Father in heaven. I'm not saying that we don't feel pain when we lose someone, of course we do, there are buckets and buckets of tears. But there is a sense of peace and comfort when we know our loved ones will live forever in heaven. And we know this b/c of John 3:16 that says "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."