Heaven

In some ways, I had almost an idyllic childhood or at least it looks that way in retrospect. Some of my best memories were in a very small town in Minnesota with my best friend living next door. He eventually moved.

Twenty-five years later, we reconnected via Facebook. He compared our childhood times to heaven: "The bliss and simple pleasure of swinging on a swing in the backyard on a summer day with my best friend, who I loved with absolutely no taint of the impurities and flaws that come later in life... I always think that that is what our lives will be like in heaven... yet enhanced because we will understand what we've lost and finally returned to."

Jesus said: "Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." Luke 18:17

Innocence characterizes childhood. Sadly, it quickly is destroyed in many children today. One definition of innocence is "freedom from guile, cunning, or deceit; simplicity or artlessness." Children are the first to tell you that you smell or are fat. They'll wrap their arms around your neck and tell you they love you. They will cry when they are sad. They laugh and skip and never worry about the eyes that follow them.

This past Christmas, a little four or five year old walked up in front of the church to sing. She tripped on the steps, but scrambled back up and performed. Watching her face, I could see she wasn't worried what we thought of her. I wonder if there is one adult in a million who could trip and not worry, even slightly, about his image.

I think it is their honesty about life and who they are and their simple trust to which God is referring when He invites us to come to Him like a child. Ignorance and foolishness also blind their understanding. But Jesus reveals this is not characteristic of His children: "...be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" Matthew 10:16. He does not ask us to shut off our brain, but to turn it on for Him.

What does all this have to do with heaven?

Charles Stanford said, "Heaven must be in me before I can be in heaven." This is the point Jesus was making when He said the pure in heart will see God (Matthew 5:8). Yet how can we return to the innocence of children? He explains that we must be born again, born a second time (John 3:1-21). When questioned about what this means, Jesus stated the most frequently quoted, yet poignant scripture: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
(Joh 3:16-17)

Heaven is still a distant place that each person will receive or reject forever before they die. Is heaven in you?

Imagine

Imagine a place where everyone is born colourblind. All the world looks black and white. A doctor comes from a distant place offering a surgery which would allow one to see colours. Most reject it. Not only does the risk of surgery seem foolish, but the desire for colour is incomprehensible. How can one explain green, yellow, and blue to one who knows only grey, white, and black? No desire can be aroused where there is no understanding of deficiency.

To me, this is the dilemma in spiritual vision. Many who have never read the Bible ignore or try to discredit it by what they have heard, know, or feel. The ocean and grass are black and the sun white because they have no comparison outside their own resources. To explain life only from what one thinks or feels is to credit oneself with complete understanding in which one is capable of judging all life's truths.

Proverbs 14:12 says, "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."
Do you believe that in you lies sufficient knowledge? Or, are you willing to consider there may be reality outside your sphere of understanding?

God and Life

At the end of the book of Job, God addresses the questions raised about justice and Himself. Interestingly, He doesn't explain why horrible things happened to Job; He doesn't even comfort him. God merely points to His own intimate knowledge and control of every aspect of creation; then He asks Job if he considers Him injustice.

Many have analyzed this story. Many theories have been written about why God responds to these five people the way He does. The thing most striking to me, however, was how God held them accountable for what they said and did after they were confronted by Him. Not that He didn't care what went on before, but a change of heart in every one of them is what He sought. Only Job responded with spontaneous confession when his focus was changed from himself to God.

Many suffer all over the world every second of every day. We may ask why, but until it is our community, our friend, our loved one, we don't often ask with passion. When pain hits home, that is when questions often change from why suffering to who is God and is He someone I want to know? "We receive His blessings and know His word, but do we know Him?" author Oswald Chambers questions.

One of the greatest fears of my adult life has been the fear of grief. I have had a comfortable life, and yet have experienced occasions of internal pain, grief that felt like it would suffocate me, sorrow that felt so heavy that death was more welcome than living that way. Thankfully, the grief did not remain so intense, either because it was not tied to anything tangible or because the sorrow came over time in different ways. Some grief is like chronic pain; it is possible to go through a day or longer unaware that you feel pain until something happens that either intensifies the pain or reminds you of it. What I have experienced is no worse than anyone's experience who lives into adulthood. On the contrary, it is better than most. I internalize more and am intensely conscious of thoughts and feelings.

But it is this awareness of the intensity of grief which causes me to struggle to not give in to fear. I have often questioned my own allegiance to God. Is it built on the basis of what He has done for me? Is it contingent on what He will continue to do for me? Or is it based on a relationship, on years of spending time with Him? Is He strong enough to bear my grief when all other hope in this life has died? Can He carry me in victory to the grave?

I doubt myself more than anything. I cling to His promise that He has begun a good work in me and He will accomplish it completely on the day Yeshua the Messiah returns (Php 1:6). I say to Him when I am most scared, "I trust You."

Silence

When was the last time you sat in silence for a length of time? If you are one of the few who pursue it, you will find it...addicting. No, it isn't easy to sit for hours and ponder, to not talk or activate some noise-maker. It's not that silence is addicting in the way that it is unavoidable or impossible to stop, but it stirs something within, a type of hunger. Maybe it's just the realization of a hunger there all the time but too quiet to hear amidst life's clatter.

Silence is often the place we see our faces in the inner mirror; it's hard to ignore imperfection when you're alone with it. It's also where the full effects of grief are unavoidable; there is nothing there to drown it out; it must be experienced. If loss is great in silence, how much more potent is joy? I wonder if the truly joyful ones in this world are those who learn not just to talk to God, but to sit with Him in silence; to listen.

Silence isn't a lack of noise: a car drives by, a heater runs, water drips. Even in the most silent places on earth there is white noise; that noise your ear insists on hearing. It's not so important to eliminate all the noise around as it is to eliminate the noise within.

In the book of Job, Job's friends stayed for seven days in silence grieving with him. Was this common amongst the ancients or did they find it difficult to not launch immediately into their quick answers, trite comforts, and ignorant speeches?

In the early days of the church, more than now, silence was a discipline. Some of the greatest historical writings were conceived and birthed in closed rooms, prison cells, or death chambers. Speech meant more to the people who had spent deep hours pondering Scripture, listening to God, recognizing themselves.

I wonder how many books, speeches, or songs mass produced in the stores today will endure. How many, if the world lasts a hundred years from now, will look back on our century and find anything of depth worth savoring or preserving?

What is death?

Strangely enough, with the celebration of Yeshua's birth, I find myself contemplating many aspects of death. Sounds morbid maybe, but, along with taxes, isn't it one of the certainties of life?

Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, described death as the closing of a book or water freezing over. "It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore." Each one is a mystery, Dickens says, to every other. When that life has ended, the mystery is buried.

What is it in human nature that seeks to know, to understand, to solve? Even the tritest thing--an allusive fact one should know, a name--irritates one's mind until it is recalled. Might this not be a small thread in the large shroud of death? Might this unsolved mystery in a loved one be what keeps us wanting to know more, even unconsciously, and thus the feeling of loss, of being cheated when death cuts short the breath and stills the heart?

In Love Letters from Cell 92, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his fiance' Maria write of the hopes they have that the Nazis will find him innocent of the conspiracy to kill Hitler, and they will at last be able to marry. Reading these letters is both beautiful and tormenting. Watching the dates of the letters progress and knowing that Bonhoeffer will die a couple days before the Allies victory, sets an eery back-drop to their love. It also poses the question--why? Why so close to victory, does he have to die? Why with all their hope in God's deliverance is he not spared...is she not spared? It's too easy to come up with answers: answers to defend God, answers that might try to comfort the grieving.

We probably all know many who grieve during this season. Memories of celebrations past always seem to make Christmas' time one of the hardest to bear loneliness and grief. Friday afternoon, I heard the cries of a co-worker on the phone, "Oh, no! No! Please, no!" then heart-wrenching sobbing. It was repeated. I have heard it before. Cries like the dry vomiting of the heart.

Even with hope, with knowledge that the one who died is in heaven, will be seen again, there is an earthly finality. The mystery is cut short. Their touch is lost. Death itself is a mystery. Our Creator's thoughts are a mystery. Maybe the greatest comfort I can give to one grieving is not words, but touch; not knowledge, but presence.

I'm trying to grasp reality: the balance of laughter beside grieving, of hope beside despair, of comfort beside helplessness; to give the hugs, to hold the hands, to say the words now before the mysteries I love close to me and open in eternity.

Northerness

This time of year--fall, winter, Thanksgiving, Christmas--sets me thinking about years past. Almost inevitably, I feel an ache for an intangible day, an idyllic childhood, a memory of complete acceptance in my family. Almost inevitably, in my memory, I come up empty of such a life, day, moment. Why?

One of my favourite authors, C.S. Lewis, tried to capture and analyze this feeling throughout his lifetime. He called the ache "Joy" and described it as different from both pleasure and happiness. In his youth, Lewis discovered the feeling inexplicably rising up in the midst of a piece of music or a story. It could never be duplicated at will from the same music or story, however.

Looking back in his autobiography, Lewis wrote, "I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.... Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.... All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'.... I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy."

At this time of year when Nostalgia settles in with the bustle of activity, what is it really that you are longing for? Could you go back to it or is it just a stab of Joy?