I-YOUniverse

I feel like a sap, writing about heaven. Hard-headed realists do without it. People with the purest motives do without it.

Not me. I need heaven.

What the mind cannot conceive

I grant you that words about heaven are language that can’t be put into words, the chick breaking its shell.

So I’m not into streets of gold and all that jazz. It’s metaphor.

The same goes for hell. Literal fire and brimstone etc. etc. belong to another age or another mindset. I’m not attacking or belittling it, just admitting it’s not my point of view.

Heaven’s where God is

The psalmist wrote:

You guide me with your counsel,
     and afterward you will receive me with honor.

Whom have I in heaven but you?
     And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,
     but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalms 73:24-26 (NRSV)

 I’m not exactly where he or she is, because on earth I love my wife and my son, and others, too. On a lighter note, books and chocolate make my list. (Not necessarily in that order.)

For here and now a taste

It’s the other lines of the psalm that get me. You guide me here and now….God is the strength of my heart. God is present in the moment, not some far-off future or distant past.

Yet, my heart longs for a deeper, truer union with God. It’s like what I have now is just a taste. But what I have now is enough to persuade me that God’s promises for the future are true.

Sandy made this scrumptious blueberry cheesecake for my birthday. She came into the living room with a spoonful of blueberry topping. “There’s too much, do you want a taste?”

Some questions don’t need asking!

Youth without acne

What prompted me to write this piece was an Aha! moment. I waste a lot of time looking back to my youth. I wasn’t much to look at back then, either. But 20 vs. 60?–you get it! And, it occurred to me that looking forward to the resurrection body is a lot more fruitful than looking back at a lost youth.

Funny, you don’t recall the acne.

I don’t have a clue what the risen body will be like, except that it will be like Jesus’:

He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.

Phil 3:21 (NRSV)

Perhaps it will be some flesh-and-bone chasis, or an energy imprinted with my transformed personality, or a memory in the heart of God.

For a long time, I’ve thought of heaven and hell, too, as relationship rather than place. Being one with God or being cut off from God.

Seeing through glass darkly

Language shatters reaching for truth of this kind.

But we can take the shards and make a window of stained glass. You can’t see out of it like ordinary glass. But you can see light, beauty, truth.

You can’t see the literal reality of heaven. Neither can you grab for it. God alone knows the number of days God has allotted each of us on earth. Gandalf reminded Denethor, authority is not given us to order the hour of our death (Lord of the Rings, 1994, p. 835). None in that epic is more selfish and petulant than Denethor, blinded by his own vanity.

However glorious the future may be, the present partakes of it already here and now. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Heaven begins here and now

I need to know that, when my flesh and heart fail, as now when they function (more or less), God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

I once preached a sermon entitled “Hometown: Heaven” about Abraham. “He looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Heb 11:10 (NRSV)

The point is not pining all the time to be someplace you’re not. Born and reared in El Paso, I’ll always be a paisano–think of mountains as bare granite jagging up into an endless clear blue sky above red land that grows prickly pear and yucca, listen for the melody of Spanish, admire the might of the Maya and Aztecs, and love Mexican food.

The point is being citizens in two dimensions at once, finding heaven now and here.

I suppose living on both sides of the border makes me a sap.

But then I’m in pretty good company.