I remember the mist from Old Faithful sprinkling my cheeks, like seductive perfume from the Underworld. I remember the acrid sting of sulfur in the air, and the breeze blowing dust in lazy circles. The sky was quiet and filmy, like blue cheesecloth stretched to dry. I remember the seared, lumpy rock that looked like it had ushered in the rest of the world. The pools of torrid azure liquid dotted the ground; this fragile crust underneath my feet cracked in places, roped off but terrifyingly close. 

 How many unsuspecting creatures stumbled across one of these pools and sank to a fiery death? They would have been cremated, turned into ash and rock, and nobody remembers them.

Nothing lasts. That kind word we say today will be forgotten tomorrow. The waves of time will swamp our good intentions and ambitions until not even an indentation in the sand remains. The hours when sleep doesn’t come and loneliness cries will vanish in the morning. But so will the golden mornings, when sunlight touches the fields and the earth smells of dew and grass.

  Nothing lasts. Bodies decompose and become part of the dirt, plants die and return to the ground, wood rots and disappears, everything eventually dissolves into the earth from which it came. In a thousand years, will the whole world be full of craters of bubbling lava? Will it be a raging wilderness of heat and brittle desert? Even the rock won’t last forever. If the earth lives long enough, it will be swallowed by the sun or sucked into a black hole. Everything we know will be obliterated. 

 Or will it? The God-man who stepped out on the waves, stopped the sun in its tracks, walked in a furnace, put the spark of life back into bodies already turning back to the dirt, who defied science countless times, says no. One thing will last. 

 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will remain forever.