Thinking about heaven

I don't have many memories from childhood, so those that I have are very important to me. While I was driving in this morning, I drifted in my thoughts back to a moment when I was a very young boy living in Cambridge, Indiana. In my memory I was a lying in grass, very thick green grass, on my back and looking straight up at the sky. I remember that it was sunny, but not so bright that it hurt my eyes or caused me to squint. The breeze was blowing and the air was clean and fresh. The big blue sky was dotted with puffs of white, cottony clouds. I was watching the billows toddling across the sky, slowly changing shape in time with the currents of wind blowing across my body and tussling the patches of the long blades of grass around me. I remember trying to discern the shapes of the clouds and recognize in them some figure that was familiar to me. It was a Robert Browning moment where, "God's in his heaven...All's right with the world!" Only I was little, very little, and had no notion of how wrong the world could be, or that God truly lives in heaven and knows and loves me beyond anything I could imagine. I wouldn't make those discoveries until much later.

It is funny to hear people talk about heaven; some get really excited about streets of gold, or angels or something like that, but I picture heaven to be a place that eternally causes me to feel like I did as a little boy in that brief moment when I lay in the grass watching the clouds. In the middle of my crazy world, I am comforted by the hope that one day I will dwell forever in a place where the longing that is evoked in my heart when I reflect on that instant in time during my boyhood, will be perpetually and eternally satiated with the presence and reality of Christ, who will be as real and present as the grass, the sky, the clouds, and the wind were to me on that day.

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