WHEN WE FINALLY GET TO BE OURSELVES

'"Won't it be nice when we die, Edie, and we can finally be ourselves?"'

Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked it Over, p.163.

THE POWER OF FANTASY

'My childhood was surrounded by a communal daydreaming, the richest sort of imaginative talk, that began this way - in work, in the misery of work, to make the work bearable and even pleasant. Such talk ranged all the way from a kind of sensuous realism to utter fantasy, but because the bounds of possibility were almost always ignored I would say that the impetus was always that of fantasy. I have heard crowds of men, weary and hungry and hot near the end of a day's work, construct long elaborate conversations on the subject of what would be good to eat and drink, dwelling at length and with subtlety on the taste and the hotness or the coldness of various dishes and beverages, and on combinations of dishes and beverages, the menu lengthening far beyond the capacity of any living stomach. I knew one man who every year got himself through the ordeal of the tobacco harvest by elaborating from one day to the next the fantasy of an epical picnic and celebration which was always to occur except, richly, marvelously, in the minds of his listeners.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.44.

DON'T LOSE THE SUPERNATURAL THRUST OF CHRISTIANITY

'Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.114.

BLISS NOW IS JUST THE BASELINE

'How easily we forget that the highest pinnacles of bliss in this life are merely the baseline for the world to come.'

Adam Ramsey, Faithfully Present: Embracing the Limits of Where and When God Has You, p.85.

HOW THE PSALMS GET US LOOKING FORWARD

'The book of Psalms, God's poetry, gives us an ecosystem of metaphors and a garden of words to describe the thriving offered to us in the New Creation.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.37.

A PARABLE FOR MAKING

'Here, then, is the central parable for our Making journey:

Imagine a father taking his child to the beach. The father watches his child make a sandcastle, which will be washed away by the high tide.

But the father happens to be an architect. Imagine that this father loves his child so much and is astonished at the design of the castle that is child has made.

Several years later, the child looks in amazement as the father creates a real castle that is based on the the sandcastle that the child created.

This may be close to what the New Creation will be like. God desires in God's heart to be with the child as the child plays on this side of eternity. God chooses, out of God's gratuitous heart, to co-create into the New World. There is no particular need for the architect father to create an actual building, but the father re-creates in love, and he has the power to do so. The New Creation is filled with such attentive, self-giving outworking of God's love toward us.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.35.

HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

THE EPITOME OF DIVINE GRACE

'This is the epitome of divine grace: a meal in the presence of God.'

Tim Chester, Truth We Can Touch, p.59.

A HEAVENLY SWIM

'...heaven will be an eternal swim in the ocean of God's love.'
Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.174.

THE GREAT MARRIAGE

'There will come the time, when Christ will sweetly invite his spouse to enter with him into the palace of his glory, which he had been preparing for her from the foundation of the world, and he shall as it were take her by the hand, and lead her in with him: and this glorious bridegroom and bride shall with all their shining ornaments, ascend up together into the heaven of heaven; the whole multitude of glorious angels waiting upon them: and this Son and daughter of God shall, in their united glory and joy, present themselves together before the Father; when Christ shall say "Here I am, and the children, which thou hast given me": and they both shall in that relation and union, together receive the Father's blessing; and shall thenceforward rejoice together, in consummate, uninterrupted, immutable, and everlasting glory, in the love and embraces of each other, and joint enjoyment of the love of the Father.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.87.

THE TELESCOPE OF FAITH

'When you have a telescope, you can look through the wrong end (which makes everything look much further away than it is). Or you can look through the right end, and the distance is compressed for a moment. Too many of us have the telescope of faith turned the wrong way round, and Christ looks further away. Too many of us are so fixated on this life, particularly on what's not going well for us, with life's disappointments. The telescope is turned the other way, and heaven just seems further away even than it does without it. 

Song 5:1 makes us turn the telescope the right way around. Christ invites us to look at that day through the lens of this text and make it more real, more immediate. This text is intended to offer healing for our greyness and grumpiness. As we struggle in this life, we look through the telescope and we see the wedding feast, the perfect world and the glory that will be ours for all eternity. We see that we have not missed out on anything that matters because we are heading into the centre of the universe of all history to which marriage and sexuality point - and to which all singleness and unexpressed sexuality points to - the final climax of intimacy that will be ours in Christ.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.104. 

HOPING FOR THE MIRACULOUS TO BREAK IN PERMANENTLY

'Miracles leave no trace. He had decided, hearing his father preach on the subject, that they happened once as a sort of commentary on the blandness and inadequacy of the realty they break in on, and then vanish, leaving a world behind that refutes the very idea that such a thing could have happened...he sat down on a bench with his hat beside him and thought what it might be like if the miraculous became the natural order of things. Loaves and fishes in inexhaustible supply. Troops of Lazaruses putting off their cerements. Infinite hours where Della was always waiting for him, and he was always somehow not a disappointment.' 

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.219.

WHY SEX IS SUCH A TEMPTING IDOL

'It is very tempting to make an idol out of sex, especially as sex can at its best, bring us the nearest many of us get to heaven in this lifetime.'

Jo Ind, Memories of Bliss: God, Sex, and Us, p.142. 

WHAT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO

'...one day God is going to walk us through the wardrobe into Narnia, and we will stand there, paralyzed with joy, wonder, astonishment, and relief.'

Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.209. 

HEAVEN IS HERM

'Herm was the best place we could ever imagine and I'm afraid that, when the mater used to tell us about Heaven and how we must try hard to get there, nearly all of us were wondering whether if it was really a patch on Herm.' 

Basil Macdonald Hastings, Memoirs of a Child, p.103. 

HOMESICK FOR THE FUTURE

'Nowhere was my sense of belonging as complete or unambiguous as it was in my childhood home, but if I saw that sense of belonging as something exclusive to the ironstone house, then I would never really leave, never grow up, never look for my place in the world. Somehow I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.' 

William Fiennes, The Snow Geese, p.203. 

HEAVEN IS NOT OUR HOME

'...contrary to the popular saying, haven is not our home. Earth is. Not earth as it is now, but Earth as it will be in the future. Our hope isn't for another place, but another time. Yes, as followers of Jesus, we go to heaven when we die, but we don't stay there. If Jesus is a "ticket to heaven," as the preacher says, then he's a round-trip ticket, not a one-way. Because at the resurrection, we come back.'

John Mark Comer, Garden City, p.248. 

HUMAN LONGING

'A man's reach should exceed his gasp, or what's a heaven for?' 

Robert Browning in Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.147. 

EAT & DRINK BECAUSE TOMORROW WE LIVE

'Those without Christ often abandon themselves to eating and drinking because sometimes it looks as if tht's all there is to do before we die. But those who love Christ cherish eating and drinking because it looks a little like what we will do after we die.' 

David Gibson, Destiny, p.111. 

FINALLY WHOLE

'To affirm the resurrection of the dead is to confess that the God who made us will finally make us whole - spirit, soul and body (1 Thess. 5:23).' 

Richard B Hays, First Corinthians, p.279.