I Can Only Imagine

It totally took me by surprise the day I walked into a waiting room and recognized the song, I Can Only Imagine by Mercy Me, playing on the radio. It wasn't the music itself that actually surprised me. It wasn't the arrangement of the song, or it's title, it's up-till-then relative obscurity outside of certain circles, or even it's line up. Although Mercy Me is a Christian rock band, there have been others that had crossed over into popular secular music, Amy Grant or Sixpence None the Richer, for example. So it wasn't that another Christian band had somehow snuck, sans religiosity, squarely into the secular scene. No, what gave me the biggest shock wave was that this song is utterly, blatantly Christian. It plainly names Jesus, no doubt about it. In this age of tolerance, where the only intolerance that seems to be tolerated is the disparaging of Christians, the last thing I would ever have expected was for His Name to be gracing the secular airwaves. Clearly. Unmistakeably. Whoa.

As I closed the waiting room door and shuffled past 2 kids playing on the floor, I gathered my purse and sat, thoroughly enjoying and half musing about what I was hearing. Interspersed about the doctor's office were several others reading magazines or simply staring nervously off into space waiting for their time to disappear into the medical inner sanctum. No one but me seemed to be aware that the Name above all names was embedded right in the middle of the lyrics of a song playing softly from the mysterious recesses of wherever sound systems lie hidden in offices of that kind. And no one was rushing to turn it off lest it's Protagonist suddenly offend some or all of those present (but me). My musings carried me past the song itself to thoughts of a world beyond where Christ reigns supreme. When it suddenly occured to me. There is no need for doctors in heaven.

Rather elemental, but I think I blinked twice at the thought, which expanded into the next. Not only is there no present need for doctors beyond the pearly gates, once Jesus returns to reestablish the Kingdom on earth, there won't be a future need for them, or for lawyers either. Or psychiatrists/psychologists. Not nurses, paramedics, veterinarians, not pharmacists. In a new-earthly perfection, where there is no sickness or death, no sorrow, no pain, the need for the most respected and revered professions on the planet will simply be, extinct. And by an odd twist of fate, some of the lowliest of professions will be those that abound. I guess that means that the starving artists, poets and writers, craftsmen and jewel setters can all take heart that they'll *still have a job*.

And musicians. Will we not be among the luckiest of all? I can only imagine.

For those interested- Mercy Me:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/music/artists/mercyme.html