With God In A Strange LandSample

Day 5 Another land to come

Wherever we may live and no matter how established our lives may seem, as Christians we have to remember that this is all temporary. We live our lives against the sound of a ticking clock, with one eye always on a more distant horizon where God will reign and all shall be well. When we get there, that place will be more truly home than anywhere else we have ever lived.

Our love grew up

Like two saplings planted together

Bending when the winds blew

Shaking their leaves with Spring gladness

Stretching boughs out in the Summer sun

But Autumn never came with its mellow treasury of colours

It was overtaken by Winter, and one tree fell.

It grows still, I think, but elsewhere

When I come home, a little stooped perhaps

I hope to shelter beneath its branches

And laugh in its dappled shade.

In our first reading, we are introduced to a cavalcade of different people who all lived their lives in anticipation of something better that was to come. As the writer says, they saw it and welcomed it ‘from a distance’.

In the Revelation reading, that distant hope snaps into sharp relief, as if focused by the lens of a camera. Here we see a tantalizing description of a new heaven and a new earth where all the hardest things we associate with the old one have disappeared. While it doesn’t do to think so much about heaven that we are no use on earth, it is not helpful to forget it either. God holds this prospect out to us because we all need something to look forward to. As you read these words today, allow them to feed your imagination. Feast for a few moments on the prospect of a world where death and mourning and crying and pain are a thing of the past. If today is a hard day for you, then ask God to make that prospect more real today than it has ever been.

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