Heaven and Resting

I've been reading Heaven, by Randy Alcorn. One of the things he has been talking about is that in Heaven we will be active, employed in the creative exercise of our gifts.

Right now that thought is depressing.

The book of Revelation states (twice) that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. I wonder if we have to cry them all out first. Because right now, my idea of Heaven is sitting in my Father's lap and sobbing and having Him hold me like He won't ever let go.

Not that He does, even down here. But I really miss the safety of my dad's hugs, and since God calls Himself our Father so often, that must mean something.

Whether or not we have to cry all our tears first, perhaps when God wipes them away He will say something like, "My child, your life was difficult, and it was full of affliction and sorrow, just as I promised it would be." Then He will turn us around and say, "Just as I promised, look what I have made out of it." And that is when we will begin to see the first things made new.

Until seeing Him, nothing in Heaven will be worth seeing. After seeing Him?

I think I will be ready to be active again.

"Lord, if you had been here"

They must have been discussing it, going over and over it in their minds and in their conversations, because although the first story presents Mary and Martha as women with different focus points, that day both sisters come to Jesus with the exact same statement: "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."

Jesus, knowing the hearts of all men and all women, hears the questions behind these words. "Why weren't you here? Where were you?"

It was a math problem they had likely gone over again and again: "A man must travel from Jerusalem to Bethany. It is a distance of two miles. Given that he has an entourage of people who travel with him, and the likelihood that word reached him as he was in the middle of speaking to a crowd or performing a work of mercy that should not go interrupted, how long will it take him to arrive in Bethany?"

Surely not two days. Although, as it turned out, it had taken the messenger too long to locate him in the busy capital city. Even had he come the very day he received the message, Lazarus would already have been dead.

"Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." They don't really believe that Jesus needed to hear the news of Lazarus' illness from a messenger. But he wasn't there. Why wasn't he there?

This time, it is so that Lazarus can be brought back from the grave. Yet there were others who died that year in Bethany, other believers, even, who were not miraculously restored to their families. Where was Jesus?

I wonder if the sisters remembered, afterward, perhaps as they stood at the grave of Lazarus for the second time, that one of the names of the promised Messiah was Immanuel.

"God with us."

Which would have answered their question.

Thinking About You

My Communication Arts & Sciences senior seminar class was notable largely for being the class to which I paid the least attention. I sat with two friends (they know who they are) and we passed a lot of notes. I have a very clear memory of the time before class began when one of my friends started a sentence, "So we were talking about you the other night...."

It kind of blew my mind. I talked about people a lot, often repeating fun conversations I had with friends throughout the day, but it threw me to think that other people might be talking about me when I wasn't around. It was like I thought I disappeared from their lives the instant they walked out of sight of me.

Sometimes I still think like that. It's hard, isn't it, imagining what other people's lives are like? They are so separate from you, so different. But you and I should both try to remember these things I've stumbled across since senior sem:

• A lot of times when you are afraid that someone doesn't want to talk to you, they are not talking to you because they are afraid you don't want to talk to them.
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• Many, many people see you through eyes of grace. You are not the only one who can see someone's faults and love them like crazy anyway. God didn't stop His grace with you, more praise to Him for that.
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• You are both more important and less important than you could ever imagine, and both in very good ways.
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• If other people are going to talk about you after you leave, set the tone for how they do it by the way you talk about other people when they are not around.

Today I heard a couple "we were talking about you" sorts of comments. Even almost ten years after senior sem, I still don't really know what to think about it. I think I feel humbled, and gratified, that people make space in their lives and thoughts for me. It makes me want to be worth it.

I aspire to be remembered in the Philippians 1:3 sense, the way I remember so many of you--how great God is to fill my life with such wonderful people, and how thankful I am for you!

Sparrow Musings

Outside my library, in front of the handicapped and fifteen-minute parking spaces, there is a grassy strip with a few bushes and some ornamental trees. When you come at about dusk, you are greeted with a cacophony of sparrow sound.

By the time I had reached the library from work, I was fairly miserable. It's been almost six months since my dad went into the hospital and on some days, like today, it's hard to imagine ever being really happy again. And on some days, like today, when there are other things on my mind, too, failings and weaknesses, it seems like too much, like that one giant event of late spring should give me a get-out-of-jail-free card for the next year, at least. That I should be able to hold on to the perspective I had at that time. But here I am, still struggling with the same old sins as before, and it's that more than the death of my father that seems unfair, somehow.

So after picking up my hold, I had to go stand by the trees and listen to the sparrows. It's amazing. They aren't really being any louder than they are on their own, but together they all seem louder. The trees shake as they jump around on the inner branches, and fly from tree to tree. They are not still, they are not silent.

I thought about what Jesus said, about how we are more valuable than many sparrows, about how our heavenly Father watches them all. I thought about how He called us His sheep. And I thought about how sheep and sparrows have this in common, that they aren't known as the brightest or bravest of God's creatures. They're pretty useless and defenseless individually, but together they can be oddly scary. "Two are better than one," says the Preacher (Ecc. 4:9), and how much better still are hundreds, thousands, millions, clouds of witnesses.

(If your power is truly made perfect in weakness, Father, You have an awful, awful lot to work with right here with me. Please don't leave me to disgrace You.)

Tomorrow from 6:45 until about 7:30 will be the first prayer meeting for the residential program I work with at my school. It will generally take place the first school day of every week. I don't really know if anybody else will come, but we need to pray because we are at war, and because the devil is roaring around these children and hissing in the ears of those who care for them, and because it's ludicrous to act as though these things aren't happening.

If you are awake around that time, and you think about us, we could use other sparrows to shake this tree.