"Eternity"

Ken Glasziou


   On last year's New Year's Eve, billions of people witnessed the coming in of the New Millennium heralded by massive and spectacular fireworks displays that were shown to TV audiences in a world-wide coverage.

   Among the displays was one from Sydney, Australia, that took advantage of that city's coat hanger structure, the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Prominent in the display was a mile long and 200 yard thick curtain of fairy lights in which some master of the fire works art had managed to spell out "Eternity" in a beautifully crafted hand written lettering in Italics that I had not seen since I worked as a shoe-shine boy in the depression days of the 1930's.

   How and why this strange word appeared in such circumstances was puzzling and not publicized until about a week after the event.

   Virtually everybody who worked anywhere in the inner city of Sydney and its neighboring city of Newcastle during those depression years would have recognized this "Eternity," for it had been written in white chalk on the pavements and the bare walls of buildings in almost every location where it was likely to be seen. And since it was easily worn off from the pavements or washed off the brick walls, then it would have needed renewing at very frequent intervals.

   Like myself, most people thought it must be the work of some poor soul with a deranged mind anxious to score brownie points with God. But year after year it kept on being renewed in elegant hand written italics at least until I departed for WW2 in April of 1941.

   I do not remember ever seeing it again until it appeared in the Sydney Harbor Bridge fireworks display heralding in the millennium with the year 2000.

   The story that came out was that it was done out of a sense of gratitude by an unnamed fireworks expert because of the effect that the word itself eventually had in fostering his own salvation  during the 1930 period when he himself was in a state of deep suicidal depression.

   Apparently the sheer persistence of the writer who, in all kinds of weather, crept around in the middle of the night renewing the word "Eternity" in the forlorn hope that it might touch somebody, ultimately did have precisely that effect--and really did save from suicide the person who eventually pleased the whole world with his art work and craftsmanship.

   The moral of the story? Would that person who wrote "Eternity" in chalk and in praise of his God, ever have dreamt that, ultimately, it would be  viewed in wonderment by billions of people--and maybe affect millions?

   No matter how small, even trivial, our efforts may appear to be, we do not know, and cannot know, what the power of God can achieve with our sincere offerings.

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