Chapter 5 Why Don’t We Fit on Earth?

Chapter 5

Why Don’t We Fit on Earth?

Hey, lady, your suitcase is over there!” a baggage handler yelled. “Get that cart out of the way, would ya!”

“Taxi! Hey, stop—I said, ‘Taxi!’” someone hollered outside.

It was mayhem. My friend was steering me in my wheelchair through thick crowds and piles of suitcases in the baggage claim area of the Los Angeles airport. Angry passengers bemoaned lost luggage. A line of people jostled through a turnstile. Outside, taxis honked. Policemen hollered. It was a crazy ending to an even crazier day of bad weather and a late arrival. We found our luggage carousel, and my friend parked my chair to go retrieve our things.

While I waited in the midst of pandemonium, I did what I always do. I waited and sat still. Very still.

It’s a fact of life. Because I’m paralyzed from the shoulders down, a large part of me never moves. I have instant stillness. I don’t run, I sit. I don’t race, I wait. Even when rushing, I stay put in my wheelchair. I could be scurrying through a jam-packed schedule, doing this and that, but a big part of me—due to my paralysis—is always quiet.

That’s why, if you had seen me in that busy airport, you would have noticed a satisfied smile. Perhaps in an earlier time I would have felt trapped, useless, and resentful that I could not grab my own suitcase, elbow the guy who butted in line, or hail my own taxi. But faith, honed and sharpened from years in my wheelchair, has changed that. And so, I sat there thanking God for built-in quiet and stillness before Him.

I also thought about heaven. With eyes of faith I looked beyond the sight of bumper-to-bumper traffic, the smell of sweat, cigarettes, exhaust fumes, and the sounds of my harried co-travelers, and began humming quietly…

This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through, My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue; The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.¹

For me, it was a moment of faith. Faith merely the size of a grain of mustard seed. Remember, that’s all it takes to be sure of things hoped for—future divine fulfillments—and certain of things you do not see, that is, unseen divine realities.

Of what was I so sure and certain? Here, let me sing it again: “The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, / And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”

I hum that haunting tune in other places besides the Los Angeles airport. Sometimes I get that “can’t feel at home” sensation ambling down the aisles of K-Mart, watching women grab for the blue-light specials. Sometimes it happens sitting with Ken watching Monday Night Football’s fourth instant replay of a team’s third-down conversion. And I definitely feel “this world is not my home” as I sit on the Ventura-Freeway-turned-parking-lot.

Don’t think I’m strange. Christians have felt the same for centuries. Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who spent most of his years battling Christianity, finally succumbed to Christ in his seventies. The intellectual world had always been home to him, but now, in the hallowed halls of university life, he found himself saying,

I had a sense, sometimes enormously vivid, that I was a stranger in a strange land; a visitor, not a native…a displaced person…The feeling, I was surprised to find, gave me a great sense of satisfaction, almost of ecstasy…Days or weeks or months might pass. Would it ever return—the lostness? I strain my ears to hear it, like distant music; my eyes to see it, a very bright light very far away. Has it gone forever? And then—ah! the relief. Like slipping away from a sleeping embrace, silently shutting a door behind one, tiptoeing off in the grey light of dawn—a stranger again. The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland.²

His words could have been mine as I wheeled through the Thousand Oaks Mall yesterday. I was a stranger in a strange land between the video game parlor on the second floor and the first floor movie complex running the latest Arnold Schwartzenegger film. Actually, I felt like a blessed stranger. A displaced, but satisfied person. Everyone seemed absorbed by the fashion show going on in the center courtyard, but I found myself thinking, Does anyone else here realize that there’s more to life than the new fall designs?

That’s what blessed strangers and satisfied displaced persons feel. They see that heaven is home. It’s where we belong. “We all have a homing instinct, a ‘home detector,’ and it doesn’t ring for earth,” says Peter Kreeft.³

I did not feel at home in that mall. I did not belong. I saw its world as trite and commonplace. Mind you, I didn’t view the people as banal or boring; if anything, my heart went out to the kids hanging around the video parlor and the ladies watching the fashion show. The troubling part was the “world” in which they were engrossed: The lure of shoe store posters on which grungy looking kids scream “Demand What You Deserve!” The morbid attraction of noisy video games that decapitate the heads and sever the arms of cartoon losers, and everywhere, huge discounts if you open up a credit account and purchase three pairs of anything. My heart especially went out to a teenage girl in jeans and plaid shirt who was staring enviously at the gaunt figure of a female mannequin who stared back at her through lifeless eyes. That said it all.

I couldn’t help but see something past this world; it was not unlike the moment of faith I experienced in the Los Angeles airport. How so? Because faith is double-sided. It not only verifies heaven as real, giving hard and fast reality to that which we do not see, but it also makes us look differently at visible things on earth. Through faith’s eyes, heaven becomes a rock-solid home, and the concrete world in which we live becomes drained of substance and importance. When we look at life through eyes of faith, things around us no longer possess the glow of excitement. Everything from Rolex watches to the latest episode of All My Children, from the newest Liz Claiborne fashions to the latest filibuster in Congress.

Because faith makes invisible things real, and visible things unreal, earthly dissatisfaction becomes the road to heavenly satisfaction. One place, heaven, supplants the other, earth, as home.

Aliens, Strangers, and Misfits

Faith does another thing. The more homelike heaven becomes, the more you feel like an alien and stranger on earth. Maybe some people price top-of-the-line Porsches, but that only reveals that “their mind is on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:19–20). I’m not talking spiritual snobbery here, and I have no beef against Lexus cars or knits by St. John’s. It’s simply a matter of focus: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Please don’t think I drive a clunker, wear my sister’s hand-me-downs, hate the mall, and never turn on a television. I like nice stuff. Don’t forget, I spent the first chapter describing all the present moments and past memories that, for me, make earth so rich. I’m the one who enjoys earth’s good things like prime rib rare with Yorkshire pudding, a night of romance with my husband, Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite, and the feel of raw silk on my face. There’s nothing trite, banal, or boring about these pleasures. What’s more, if I could be entrusted, I’m sure my conscience would be thrilled to permit me to don a beautiful Jones of New York suit. (It would probably go to my head, which is why some of my Christian friends can wear this garb with grace while I can’t.)

This feeling of being an alien or stranger on earth has more to do with the song I told you about. The haunting echo. The longing and yearning I felt that hot afternoon by the Kansas wheat field, and many times since. The writer of Hebrews 11:13–16 definitely had me in mind when he said, “People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.”

I’m a little like a refugee who is longing for my better country called heaven. My heart is in quasi-exile. In fact, 1 Kings 11:14–22 is just a brief story, but it’s “me” all over. It seems that Hadad, an adversary of Solomon, had fled for safety to Egypt with some of his father’s family. There he found great favor with Pharaoh, married into the king’s family, and reared his son in the royal palace. But when he heard that David was dead, “Hadad said to Pharaoh, ‘Let me go, that I may return to my own country.’”

“‘What have you lacked here that you want to go back to your own country?’ Pharaoh asked.”

“‘Nothing,’ Hadad replied, ‘but do let me go!’”

That’s the part I identify with. Earth may be rich with past memories and present moments as it was with Hadad, but I’m hot on his heels: “Let me go, that I may return to my own country.” It is always the exiles who remember home. The Israelites, captive in a foreign land, remembered their true country when they mourned in Psalm 137:1: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” Like Hadad, like the Israelites, I carry in my exiled heart a hunger for my heavenly country, my soul’s true home.

A person who feels at home “fits” with his environment, like a fish in water, a bird in the sky, or a worm in the dirt. But we don’t “fit” here. It’s not our environment. There is no harmony, no “rightness,” with our surroundings. Remember my experiences in the Los Angeles airport and the Thousand Oaks Mall? It wasn’t as though the hustle and bustle of that world offended me; it’s just that it didn’t jibe, it didn’t resonate with the peace and stillness in my heart, a peace that echoed, “You don’t belong here.”⁴

Feeling like an exile is simply feeling a fact.

O Lord,

I live here as a fish in a vessel of water,

only enough to keep me alive,

but in heaven I shall swim in the ocean.

Here I have a little air in me to keep me breathing,

but there I shall have sweet and fresh gales;

Here I have a beam of sun to lighten my darkness,

a warm ray to keep me from freezing;

yonder I shall live in light and warmth forever.

A Puritan prayer⁵

Why Don’t We Fit?

As Christians, you and I are not made for this world.

Well, in one sense we are. Our hands, feet, eyes, and ears equip us for physical experiences on this planet made of water and dirt. Our ears process noise, our eyes register sights, our noses detect odors, and our stomachs digest food. But we are also spirit. This makes for incredible tension. Someone once said, “Through faith we understand that we are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a physical experience.” A friend, Peter Kreeft, writes about this tension and I borrow some of his ideas here…

As spiritual beings, you and I are not made for this world because the earth is temporal. There is something in us that is definitely not temporal. That’s why we squirm and groan against the confines of time. The clock, for us, is an adversary. Every heavenly moment—whether it be gazing into the soft eyes and gentle smile of the one we love or relishing the ecstasy of some glorious pleasure—every moment like this we embrace so we might keep time at bay. But we can’t. We would like to call these moments timeless, but they’re not. Time snatches them from our grasp.

This is where the tension really kicks in. For in one sense, as Sheldon Vanauken writes, “Time is our natural environment. We live in time as we live in the air we breathe. And we love the air…How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments…We wished to know, to savor, to sink in—into the heart of the experience—to possess it wholly. But there was never enough time.”⁶ I can’t explain the tension any better than that. Time is our natural environment, yet time is not our natural environment.

It’s not just Christians who kick against the traces of time. People who don’t believe in God consider time an adversary. For them, the ticking of the second hand sounds like the stalking of an enemy. Each minute moves them toward death. And everyone, whether rich or poor, tries to grab the hour hand to shove it backward. “Slow down and live” is a slogan on everything from highway signs to health books. But we can’t slow down time. Wrinkle cream won’t do it. Pumping your brain and brawn with Vitamins E and A won’t do it. And freezing your body in an iced hydrogen chamber won’t stop time either. It’s the honest person who would agree with C. S. Lewis when he says, “Time itself is one more name for death.”⁷

All of humanity senses this, for, “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Yes, people in general just can’t fathom God, let alone this thing about a timeless eternity. They don’t know what to do with it except to buy Shirley MacLaine’s latest New Age best-seller or apply more Oil of Olay. Their only real recourse against the onslaught of time is their memories. “Memory is our only dike against the waves of time in this world,” says Peter Kreeft.⁸

Longing for Another Time

I know what it’s like to grab hold of memories, like bricks, and build a dike against time. When I was first paralyzed in 1967—and still new to this eternity thing as a young Christian—heaven was in no way my home. I was less interested in looking forward to a glorified body and more interested in turning back the clock to days when my body worked. Time was also an enemy in that it kept putting more distance between the past on my feet and the present in my wheelchair. The only way I could slow down the weeks and months was to dive into my memories.

I couldn’t do much but listen to the radio or records. I laid on the stryker frame in the intensive care unit and tuned into Diana Ross moaning about a lost love or Glen Campbell crooning about an old flame wandering on the back roads of his memory. The Beatles were also popular then. I would fight back the tears when they’d sing of a yesterday when troubles seemed so far away.

Then there was Joni Mitchell. Folk music still lingered in the late sixties, and I found refuge in her restless songs about the past. Her music evoked a more powerful and fundamental nostalgia than pining for a lost love or a trouble-free yesterday. You can hear it in the sixties anthem she penned for a lost and searching generation. It was a generation that came in droves to find itself on the hot, rainy hillsides of a farm in New York. Listen to the ache and the haunting longing in her song called “Woodstock”:

Well can I walk beside you?

I’ve come here to lose the smog

And I feel as if I’m a cog

In something turning ‘round and ‘round.

Maybe it’s the time of year

Or maybe it’s the time of man,

But I don’t know who I am,

Yet life is for the learning.

We are stardust, we are golden,

Caught up in the devil’s bargain,

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the Garden.

We’ve got to get ourselves

Back to a semblance of a God.⁹

Joni Mitchell and thousands like her are looking for something incalculably precious they’ve lost, something they’ve got to get back to. They may mistake it for the nostalgia of the sixties or the fifties; they may mistake it for a childhood memory, a lost love, or a yesterday when one’s troubles seemed so far away, but it’s much more than that. It’s a nostalgia not for the innocence of youth, but for the innocence of humanity. “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden,” a lost world groans, because it’s Eden where we lost not just our youth, but our identity.

We may not realize it, but the whole of humanity is exiled from the bliss of the intimate presence of God, “walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening.” But being “dead in our trespasses,” humanity doesn’t realize this is what it longs for. Most people don’t understand that to walk with God is to feel at home.

What’s funny is I’m convinced even if people could reach back into the Garden, if Joni Mitchell could go back to the moment of the creation of the world, it wouldn’t be enough. She’d stand there in the middle of a perfect environment and feel perfectly ill at ease, not realizing satisfaction could only be found by taking one more step off the edge of time itself and into the mind of God. For our nostalgia for Eden is not just for another time, but another kind of time. Those who do not believe still feel the tug. Even those who do not hope for heaven still wrestle with this vexing enigma of “eternity” set in their heart.

Most people have it backward.

Unlike those who don’t believe in God, our road is not back to the Garden of Eden, but forward. One should never look over one’s shoulder on the road of hope. In Genesis, God sent the seraphim with the flaming sword to bar Adam and Eve from returning to Eden once they had fallen. “The road to God lies ahead, ‘east of Eden,’ through the world of time and history, struggle and suffering and death. Ejected from Eden’s eastern gate, we travel through and around the world, from west to east, forever seeking the rising sun (the Rising Son!) and find Him standing at the western gate…saying, ‘I am the door.’”¹⁰

Our True Identity

Our lost youth and lost identity are not to be recovered in the innocence of Eden. God conceived of us before Eden, “before the foundation of the world.” Only in heaven—the birthplace of our identity—will we find out who we truly are. Actually, we won’t find it so much as receive it. This is beautifully symbolized in Revelation 2:17: “To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.”

Did you get that part about our new name? George MacDonald explains the connection between our new name and our true identity this way: “God’s name for a man must be the expression of his own idea of the man, that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought through the long process of creation which went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success.”¹¹

Our true identity will unfold in the new name God will give us. And the name is a secret between God and you. Think about that, friend! In heaven, you will not only find what was irretrievably lost, but when you receive it—your new name, your true identity—you will be a thousand times more yourself than the sum total of all those nuances, gestures, and inside subtleties that defined the earthbound “you.” On earth you may think you fully blossomed, but heaven will reveal that you barely budded.

What’s more, you will be like none other in heaven. The fact that no one else has your name shows how utterly unique you are to God. You touch His heart in a way no one else can. You please Him like none other. It is a royal seal of His individual love on you.

This shouldn’t surprise us. God hasn’t carved out a gigantic celestial ballpark called heaven into which His entire family fits. Paradise is not a general commune for a lump sum of saints. God has chosen to save certain individuals, and you have a specific place niched in heaven—in God’s heart—which fits you and you alone. In heaven you will reflect Him like a facet of a diamond, and people will say to you, “I love seeing that part of God in you…in fact, you show off that trait of His better than anybody up here!”

Everyone else will receive their true identity too. They also will reflect God in unique and complete ways; so you will probably say to that friend, “Well, I love the way you reflect Him this way!” And together the two of you, as well as all the other saints, will praise God that He is “all and in all” with such variety and beauty.

C. H. Spurgeon suggested this is why redeemed people will number more than the grains of sand on the beach or the stars in the sky. An endless number of saints will be required to fully reflect the infinite facets of God’s love. Everyone is necessary in heaven. Could it be that without you, some wonderful nuance of God’s love, dare I say, might not get reflected were you not in heaven?

United in perfect praise and love, we will finally and fully discover who we are, where we belong, and what God destined us to do—and we will have all of eternity to be and do that very thing. For centuries, theologians have attempted to describe this scene; I think Jonathan Edwards does a good job when he writes, “Thus they shall eat and drink abundantly, and swim in the ocean of love, and be eternally swallowed up in the infinitely bright, and infinitely mild and sweet, beams of divine love; eternally receiving that light, eternally full of it, and eternally compassed round with it, and everlastingly reflecting it back again to its fountain.”¹²

You will recognize the ones you love. On earth you only half-recognized them. But in heaven, you will discover rich, wonderful things about the true identity of your husband, wife, daughter, son, brother, sister, or special friends, things that were only hinted at on earth. What’s more, you will know them like you never knew them on earth. After all, we won’t be less smart in heaven, we will be more smart. My husband, Ken, will be a thousand times more “Ken” than he ever was in flesh and blood. You will exclaim to your loved one, “Wow, so this is what I loved in you for so long!” for you will see him or her as God intended all along.

Until we are there, doing what God purposed for us from the beginning, we will be the caterpillar writhing to be free of the cocoon, to breathe celestial air. We will feel very much like Moses cocooned away in the back side of a desert who cried, “I have become an alien in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22). And just as Moses was becoming, in the desert, the leader he would eventually be, we are pilgrims becoming, in the here and now, who we shall be in the hereafter.

So onward we pilgrims tread through this world of time and death, forever seeking the Son. We don’t go backward but, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, [we] press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called [us] heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).

General humanity refuses to go in this direction. In an anxious search to fit, people take the world’s sextant and try to locate their present position using all the wrong coordinates: memories of childhood, an old romance, carefree days, songs, power, religion, wealth, or Woodstock. But humanity keeps failing to recognize that it is “made in the image of God.” Only believers who understand that the coordinates converge in eternity can sing, “This world is not my home.”

Our Place in Time

Joni Mitchell won’t make it back to the Garden. She would do better to sing of God’s Son in her quest for not only identity, but for another time. Jesus is the only One who was ever comfortable with His identity, as well as comfortable in or out of time.

One second Jesus could be conversing with friends on the road to Emmaus, the next He could bypass the hours required to travel to Jerusalem and appear there in no time flat. He could materialize one morning on a beach, then start a fire and whip up breakfast for His friends. One minute He could eat a fish, the next, pass through a wall. Stone walls and unopened doors in the Upper Room presented no barriers. Time, space, and therefore distance were, for Him, a cinch. This is very interesting because His ability to move in and out of various dimensions clues us into where time fits in heaven. I don’t think heaven will destroy time, so much as swallow it up.

Let me explain using a principle I learned from high school geometry. If you move a dot through time and space, it makes a line—the first dimension. Take that line, move it laterally through time and space, and it becomes a plane—the second dimension. Move a plane through time and space, and you get a cube or some other polyhedron—a cube is the third dimension and it’s comprised of a stack of planes.

And you and I, who are three-dimensional figures, move through time and space—we might consider that a fourth dimension. Each new dimension enfolds the previous ones, plus something more. This means eternity—we might think of that as a fifth dimension—will comprise all the interesting elements of the other dimensions, including time.

Hey, if you get that, you get an A in geometry. You also get that time won’t stop in heaven, but will be swallowed up. Time will be folded into eternity and lose its distinction much like egg whites when they are folded into cream. Or more to the point, like folding one egg white into an ocean of cream. That’s how all-encompassing eternity is.

Why is this thing about time so important? Peter Kreeft explains, “God fell in love with us creatures of time, us passing gusts of wind, us passing guests, and invited us into the inner sanctum of the Master of the House forever—all of us, lock, stock and barrel full of time. How dare we deny Him His heart’s desire? It is our heart’s desire, too.”¹³ He’s right. There’s something inside of me that time helps define, and I’m not so sure I want to deny it, as much as discover all its hidden treasure.

Jesus, having both a divine and human nature, presented a kind of formula for our nature and destiny. The way our resurrected Lord was able to move through time and space is a prescription for our future heavenly experience. Jesus perfectly embodies physical things caught in time yet spiritual things that exist outside of time. We gusts of wind will one day feel as comfortable as Jesus when it comes to living with a physical and spiritual nature.

Bear with me on one more item regarding time, geometry, and dimensions, and we both may get an A+. All this stuff about third, fourth, and fifth dimensions proves just how interesting heaven will be.

Let me show you by asking a question: How long would staring at a dot on a piece of paper hold your interest? If you can say five seconds, I’m impressed. But what if you placed a pen on that dot and drew a line to create a two-dimensional stick figure? That’s a bit more interesting, but certainly not as provocative as observing a three-dimensional sculpture of that figure, right? If it’s a good sculpture, it might hold your attention for a long time.

Now, take it a step further. Because a sculpture is a far cry from being as fascinating as a real live human being who moves through time and space in the fourth dimension. In fact, you could spend a lifetime getting to know this captivating person. It’s a fact that each dimension is more interesting than the previous.

Now carry this little formula through to the fifth dimension, heaven. All the wondrous things about the previous dimensions will be in heaven, plus a whole lot more. This means heaven will be extremely interesting. It will be irresistible, enravishing, intriguing, and at least ten more columns of adjectives. We think earth is enthralling with all its color, glory, and grandeur! The exotic peacock, the perfect hexagons in beehives, the aquamarine of a tropical lagoon, the orangutan who makes us giggle, and the inspiring snowcapped peaks of the Alps are all part of the fourth dimension. And—ta-dah—the fifth one is about to be revealed! Our little lesson about dimensions proves heaven will be far beyond all the beauty of earth combined. Can you now see why Paul says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9)?

Who knows what wonders the fifth dimension, and probably many other dimensions, will contain. In eternity everything is just a beginning. No borders. No limits. A. W. Tozer said, “How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God who has none. Eternal years lie in his heart. For him, time does not pass, it remains; and those who are in Christ share with him all the riches of limitless time and endless years.”¹⁴

Our pilgrimage to heaven is not a journey toward the end of time, but to another kind of time. And time travelers we shall be until we arrive…at the beginning.

Discovering Unseen Realities

This dusty little planet keeps spinning through time and deep dark space, not realizing that all the while it is swimming in the ocean of eternity and surrounded by a host of unseen divine realities and divine fulfillments. But we realize it because as pilgrims “we live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). By faith we live on a different plane, in another dimension, at a higher level than the earthly one. By faith the rock-solid world becomes drained of substance and importance, and we see a heavenly meaning behind everything.

People who lack faith look at the front range of the Rocky Mountains and assume, in a mechanistic way, that a tectonic plate pushed this way and that, causing a quake and a shifting in the earth’s crust then—voilà—there appeared Pikes Peak. But pilgrims heading for heaven realize that “by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). He has created invisible things that are just as real—no, more real—than the Rocky Mountains. No wonder we praise our Creator!

People who lack faith look at a beautiful cherry tree, shrug their shoulders, and suppose a seed fell, rain poured, roots sprouted, a sapling grew, and soon it shall be someone’s firewood. God, they think, just wound nature up like a clock to let it ticktock on its way. People with heaven-inspired faith, look at the same tree and marvel that literally “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). That means all things. Right now. This instant. Even buds, bark, and branches. Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

The rest sit ‘round it and pluck blackberries.

Those with an earthly perspective assume that the waves of the sea are made up of plain old H₂O, but those with a heavenly point of view believe that every proton on the Periodic Table of the Elements is held together by God, for He is “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3). Let that fact sink in. If God were to withdraw His command, the mountains, oceans, and trees wouldn’t collapse into chaos, they would go poof and disappear! God’s creation isn’t static and inert, it’s dynamic and actually in the process of being sustained this instant by His powerful word.

And when it comes to the marvel of the human body, those who have no faith claim we’ve risen out of slime to the status of homo erectus, and assume that humans draw breath under their own power. But pilgrims with a heart for heaven know differently, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In heaven we will be more human than what our species only hinted of here. We will be more the man or the woman than what our gender only whispered of.

The faith of which I’ve been speaking imparts heavenly purpose to everything—absolutely everything—around us. This happens to me every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning when my artist friend, Patti, helps get me out of bed. Before I get in the van and she sends me off to work, we pause at the the opened garage door and take a few moments to observe the day. We look at Mr. Aquilevech’s white pine trees across the street—there’s usually a cranky crow sitting in the branches. We enjoy the way the spiky tips of the cedar trees lining my side wall have such sharp points—each tip is a perfect vertical aiming above. We admire the way Mrs. Hollander’s shrubs are starting to turn color from a silvery green to gold.

The other day Patti commented on a hibiscus bloom, reminding us, “God dreamed up that color! Perhaps just for the sheer fun of it.” Pilgrims see His delight in giving us pleasure. Heavenly sojourners see God in everything; they see that every bush they pass on earth’s wilderness is a burning bush, afire with God. And with such faith it is truly possible to please Him (Hebrews 11:6).

Heav’n above is softer blue,

Earth around is sweeter green!

Something lives in every hue,

Christless eyes have never seen:

Birds with gladder songs o’er-flow,

Flow’rs with deeper beauties shine,

Since I know, as now I know,

I am His, and He is mine.¹⁵

Madame Guyon, a seventeenth-century Christian noblewoman, wrote the following words from a French dungeon, having no hibiscus, cedar tree, sweet green earth, or soft blue heaven to cheer her on:

[The heaven-minded Christian] walks by a simple and pure faith,…and when this sojourner looks out of his own eyes, he sees things as though he were looking through the eyes of God. He sees his own life, he sees his surrounding circumstances, he sees other believers, he sees friends and enemies, he sees principalities and powers, he sees the whole course of the pageantry of history itself through the eyes of God…and is content.¹⁶

Too Heavenly Minded?

Don’t think such heavenly mindedness makes us pilgrims no earthly good. Don’t pooh-pooh it as looking at the world through pie-in-the-sky, rose-colored glasses. Sojourners who think the most of the next world are usually those who are doing the highest good in this one. It is the person whose mind is only on earthly things who, when it comes to earth, does little good. C. S. Lewis expands on this, saying, “Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”¹⁷

When a Christian realizes his citizenship is in heaven, he begins acting as a responsible citizen of earth. He invests wisely in relationships because he knows they’re eternal. His conversations, goals, and motives become pure and honest because he realizes these will have a bearing on everlasting reward. He gives generously of time, money, and talent because he’s laying up treasures for eternity. He spreads the good news of Christ because he longs to fill heaven’s ranks with his friends and neighbors. All this serves the pilgrim well not only in heaven, but on earth; for it serves everyone around him.

A few weeks ago I went to the Hair and Nail Shoppe to get a haircut. My secretary, Francie, met me at the salon to help me out of the van and get settled in front of the mirror at the hairdresser’s station. As the stylist whipped the plastic cape over me, I glanced around at the other women. Ladies sat under hair dryers absorbed in Vogue magazines. A few women gabbed with their manicurists about the latest shades of red nail polish. Blow dryers whined over Neil Diamond on the radio. I looked on either side of me: a redhead in jeans was cracking gum and cutting the locks of the lady to my right, while a short Asian woman with long black hair worked to the left.

What does a pilgrim do in an average ordinary place like this? (At least average and ordinary for southern California.) Sojourners look for the unseen divine realities around them. I tried to put myself in the shoes of these women, looking for their “realities”—divorce, dieting, raising children, running for the school board, fighting off alcoholism, and planning the next party. A few professional types in their power suits in for a quick repair on a fingernail were dealing with different “realities”—promotions, payoffs, and executive stress.

Because faith helped me see each woman as precious in His sight, I knew God had His own divine realities in mind for each woman. I could pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in the Hair and Nail Shoppe as it is in heaven.”

So, sitting with my hair all wet, I interceded off and on for each person, setting in motion God’s powerful workings in their lives. All because of faith. This is the way ordinary pilgrims make themselves of some earthly good.

And not only through prayer. As I wheeled from the station to wait for my hair to set, I noticed a little girl sitting two chairs down, swinging her legs and flipping through a tattered magazine. I asked her what she was reading and learned she was the ten-year-old daughter of the Asian woman. Within minutes we were engrossed in conversation, me telling her a Bible story, and her, explaining the games she enjoyed playing with her best friend. I told the little girl I liked her smile, her friendly manner, and the way she bypassed my wheelchair and looked into my eyes. I also told her about Jesus. For those twenty minutes I knew I was one heavenly minded person doing this child real and lasting earthly good.

My husband, Ken, lives like this. He’s been fostering a relationship with two young gas-station attendants from Iran who work at the Shell station down the road. Most people are in and out for a quick fill-up, but Ken keeps his eyes open for the unseen divine realities at work in the lives of these two men. We’re convinced that time, prayer, friendship, and a Bible in the Farsi language will make a difference. He’s one heaven-minded person looking for ways to do earth some good.

Besides this, pilgrims do battle. The spiritual war raged hot and heavy earlier this year when Ken and I helped chaperone the prom of the public high school where he teaches. The early hours of the prom were a great time to connect with students, admire their tuxedos, and wish them well at college. After dinner, though, the lights went out, the music went up, and the ballroom reverted into a wild disco. Ken had to go supervise the bathrooms; I tried talking to my dinner partner, but we got tired of screaming at each other. Through the dark and deafening noise I spotted a senior girl in a skimpy white-sequined dress sitting on her boyfriend’s knee. I decided to pray for her. As I stared at her, silently mouthing my prayer, it struck me that although the ballroom was shaking, my prayer was more powerful than the 600-amp Bose speakers angled over the dance floor. A simple intercession was shaking and sending repercussions across heaven, as well as scattering a few demons.

This is how heaven’s citizens live while temporarily residing on earth. Heaven tells us every person, place, and thing has a purpose. This is why “we do not lose heart…we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 5:16, 18).

Homesick for Heaven

We pilgrims walk the tightrope between earth and heaven, feeling trapped in time, yet with eternity beating in our hearts. Our unsatisfied sense of exile is not to be solved or fixed while here on earth. Our pain and longings make sure we will never be content, but that’s good: it is to our benefit that we do not grow comfortable in a world destined for decay.

And so we squirm and writhe, knowing we don’t quite fit; “we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.” But, oh, what a blessing are those groans! What a sweetness to feel homesick for heaven! What a glorious longing fills my heart to overflowing!

Wait a minute, Joni, perhaps you are thinking. I’m not homesick for heaven. I rarely groan and long to be there…I want to, but I don’t know where to begin. It’s not like I’m absorbed by the things of earth, it’s just heaven doesn’t feel like my home yet. Besides that, I don’t have a real prayer burden for women at hair salons, girls at proms, or guys at gas stations.

If this is you, don’t panic. If, for you, heaven is still a glass house on some golden street rather than a warm and loving home, then hang in there. If you find it difficult to muster up longing for celestial mansions, if you aren’t into this pilgrim thing, then perhaps we need to take the focus off heaven as a place.

It’s more than that…much, much more.

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