Well, we're getting towards December now already.

I wonder if you remember when you were a child and it seemed to come so very slowly.

But the older you get, the more likely you are to be saying, where did the year go?

And what have I accomplished?

Long before Einstein's theory of special relativity, people used to say time is relative.

And the fact is that the more time there is in your past, the faster you seem to hurtle

into the future.

So I thought perhaps this week would be a good time for us to think about the future.

I don't mean making plans for the holiday season or for next year for that matter.

Most of us do that anyway.

I mean the future that we sometimes, perhaps even often, don't like to think about, our own

individual, ultimate future.

The big word, as you know, is eschatology, speaking about final realities.

And theologians sometimes subdivided that topic into corporate and personal eschatology.

That is what is going to happen to the whole cosmos at the end of history, and on the other

hand what happens to us as individuals at the end of our lives.

And it's the latter that I thought we might reflect on this week.

I don't know when this way of putting it arose.

It certainly goes back to the Middle Ages, but Christians have often spoken about personal

eschatology in a fourfold way.

In fact, in some traditions, these four topics were the themes that ministers were expected

to preach about on the four Sundays before Christmas as a way of

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