Flesh Fails

​As I sit here in my bed tonight I have a bazillion thoughts running through my head.  Slowly, the thoughts are slowing down so I can focus on just one.  My night as been wild so far...
The husband snores while I'm putting 2 of my own kids plus 2 nephews in the bed.  They were like popcorn tonight.  After cleaning their rooms I put them 2 to a bed I handed the oldest of each a book and told them to read...well, still I kept hearing feet pound the floor as one or two little superheroes came bounding off the bed.  The solution tonight was LIGHTS OUT and cracked bedroom windows so they can listen for the wildlife.  That worked!  Praise the Lord and in the mean time of I managed to tackle a few tasks other than getting them to lay still.  I'm so tired!!!
Eventually, I ran a hot bath and as I slid down in the perfectly hot water I closed my eyes and my tired body appreciated the comfort but as always I am almost self conscious in front of my own self.  Today I  was exhausted mostly from lack of sleep. I stayed with my Granny all night the night before and didn't sleep a wink.  I spent hours cleaning house for her before crashing on her couch.  It was a miserable old couch to try to sleep on but I wanted to be next to her in her recliner.  She didn't sleep either.  

While I was thinking how odd it really is that I'm so self conscious of my body my mind went straight to my grandmother.  She can no longer drive herself...she hasn't in years.  Lately she can barely get around on her own but we encourage her to try.  She's had some procedures and new medication to help with how tired she is and they seem to be working for her.  I thought about how much she has become dependent on her children and grandchildren lately.  It's okay.  We want to help.  I just can't imagine getting to that point where I would need my boys and grand children to do everything for me.

I thought of my grandmothers tired body...her vessel and I imagined the soul inside and how it is aching to get out.  Eventually my body will do the same.  The aches and pains of this flesh and this life will become to great and I will be ready to move on to heaven.
Andy Andrews described it best for me in The Noticer Returns.  He described the aches and pains and crossing over like being born.  When we are in the womb we become uncomfortable and are ready to be born. When I was born I was greeted with love and open arms of family all around me.  The same will be true of when I pass away on this earth.  I will be greeted on the other side and I will have left this vessel which is tired and worn into a new "home, tent, mansion."
I didn't write this to plug a book.  I simply have so much in my head regarding the "flesh" and how it constantly fails me.  Not because it wants to but because it just does.  Instead, I try to focus on staying healthy and serving others.  There are many, many things I want to document when I read about our bodies, our flesh, and our new heavenly bodies.  So, I figured I'd start somewhere.
I sometimes feel like I'm being led down a rabbit hole or an adventure into the unknown when I'm studying scriptures.  As many times as I've read 2 Corinthians 5 about our heavenly homes, I had never thought of our homes as our bodies until one day in church I was reading a slip of paper I had written on years before that lead me to look up those verses in chapter 5.  I remembered writing the words down on that slip of paper the last night I stayed with my grandfather.  Jesus was SO present in that room with us that night.  So many little details were alive and evident.  He laid in the bed, his bod completely failing from head to toe and ready to make the cross over.  I prayed and read scripture that night because I so badly wanted peace on what was about to happen.  Losing him was hard but the peace I felt was from God.
That little slip of paper had written on it, "My papaw cried out that he wanted to "go home", we kept telling him he couldn't go home and in his drunken morphine stupor he cried.  We were essentially telling him what he already knew...that he was going home!  He was leaving this home and going into open arms to a place where he was cherished and loved more than he had ever known here.  I had read 2 Corinthians 5 that night when I realized it wasn't his earthly home he wanted.  There was NO comfort there. So, when I found that slip of paper, I went back there and studied more.
Could it be possible that the "many mansions" refer to our heavenly bodies.  I mean, if we currently live in "tents" then how could our new bodies not be like mansions in comparison.  In this "tent" we groan wanting to be clothed with our habitation from heaven.  We groan with burdens not because we want to be without our tents but because there is something better waiting for us because we know as long as we are home in this body we are absent from Him.
So as our bodies groan and moan and we become weak in our flesh and our hearts begin to fail we will remember that in 1 Chronicles 16: 11 it says that we should "Seek the Lord and His strength; Seek His face evermore."  In time these flesh tents, bodies that we live in will on purpose and in good timing give out.  We will then experience a new body like we could never imagine.  One so perfect as to be called our "mansion".