After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

These few verses are incredibly dense, but there is a key part of this that is such good news for us. In John 16, just before this passage, Jesus is speaking to his disciples and warning them that something big is about to happen. There is a shift coming that Jesus knows is going to change the course of history, and he wants them to be ready when it arrives.

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Things are starting to get real. This is it. There’s no more practice; this is game time. Everything Jesus has been saying, doing, and teaching have all led up to what is about to happen. Jesus is getting ready to defeat death, but he knows he has to experience death in order to do that.

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In preparation for this, Jesus begins to pray in John 17. It’s through this prayer that we get to see the “why” behind everything that Jesus has been doing through his ministry. Healing the sick, sitting with the broken-hearted, and eating meals with people like you and me has all led up to this one thing: Giving us a chance to experience eternal life, not just later, but right now.

The Office has plenty of quotable lines, but one of the most surprisingly deep quotes is when Andy Bernard says, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

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We’ve all probably felt something similar to that before. We go through an amazing season of life, but we don’t even realize how good it was until it’s long gone. It can be easy to spend a lot of our time trying to make our lives easier, more comfortable, or more fun. But how often do we not even see how good a season of life is because we’re so focused on something else?

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On the other hand, we’ve all also been through difficult seasons. The kind of seasons that make us look back at the “good old days” and wish things hadn’t changed. The kind of seasons that are full of uncertainty, leaving us wanting an answer for how it’s going to end.

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Jesus could have easily gotten caught up in either way of thinking. With his death fast approaching, he could have tried to get out of it and leave everything behind for something more comfortable. Or, he could have spent his last days thinking about how good his life was before this moment. But he did neither. Jesus knew that he was going to be able to bring us together with God, and he was more focused on that mission than anything else.

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And that is good news for us. Because if we decide to follow Jesus, the “good old days” are right now. We don’t have to look back to remember good times or have anxiety about looking forward. We don’t have to wait for eternity. We get to have a taste of eternity right now because Jesus brings eternal life to us. As Jesus says in verse 3, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” This is what truly matters.

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No matter what season of life you find yourself in, we know it won’t last. There is always a light at the end of a bad season, and the “good old days” always seem to go by too fast. But what we do know is that God is forever. Our hope can only come from the God who defeated death and gives us eternal life. Those “good old days” are happening right now because of Jesus.

God, thank you that you not only save us right now, but you bring us into eternity. Thank you for being the One that we can hope in because you will never fail. Help me see that no matter what season I find myself in, it won’t last forever – good or bad. But you are forever, and you are here right now. Help me see today as one of the “good old days” because it’s a day that you have made.  It’s in your name we pray, amen.