Number 29?

A milestone birthday, a fast food lunch and a nursing home down the street reminded me that the place we consider the end is really just the beginning.

My view from the restaurant

Sitting in the “home of the Whopper” where “you rule,” I could see out the window straight down a street that leads to a nursing home.

My uncle passed away there in 2012. Since moving to another part of town in June, my wife and I live very close to that nursing home now.

“Number 29?”

That’s me. Number 29. Apparently, I don’t even have a name in the kingdom where I rule. I’m just a number, like everywhere else.

I grabbed my food, slid back under my table and sank my teeth into my burger as my thoughts returned to the nursing home.

Traffic streamed past the side street leading to the nursing home, oblivious to my uncle’s existence or the existence of any of the current residents. And I wouldn’t expect it any other way. We have a limited capacity to care. And how often do I drive by nursing homes all over the city and not give the residents inside a second thought?

I kept kicking around the notion that, humanly speaking, this is how it ends for many of us. Down at the end of a lonely street … in a nursing home that most people don’t even know exists.

Today is my birthday. I am sixty years old. But don’t worry, I’m not overreacting. It’s natural for me to contemplate spiritual matters while enjoying a burger.

Spiritually speaking, I know that the end doesn’t really come in a nursing home. In Christ, it’s just the beginning. As Christians age, we long for heaven and all its promises.

It’s the place where we will receive glorified bodies that do not deteriorate. The place where the light of Jesus radiates. The place where our names (not our numbers) are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. The place where Jesus went to prepare a place for us.

In a sermon titled A Prepared Place for a Prepared People, Charles Spurgeon said this, in part about Jesus going to prepare a place for his people.

“If you go to a friend’s house, and just fall in with the ordinary proceedings of the family, you are very comfortable … but if, when you arrive, you see that everything has been done on an extra scale to prepare for your coming, you feel still more grateful. … That guest-chamber had evidently been newly furnished, and everything that was possible had been thought of to do him honour.”

If our final days are spent in a nursing home surrounded by other sick people, we can still rejoice. Our rooms might be too small. The food might be bad. And our bodies will continue to fail us. But we are headed for a home where someone has been expecting us all along.