Thinking about the new heavens and new earth and what that would look like…if it’s all really true.  If it’s true, we’ll have bodies again- and not be lifted into the air like angels on clouds with harps.  Instead- God will come down to the new earth.  “For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”  Just like we die, so will our planet- our world.  But it too will be reborn and that’s where we’ll live.  On it we’ll have the life we’ve always longed for, but has been just out of reach for some unknown reason.

On the new earth we’ll live in a holy city.  I’m glad- I love cities.  When I was in my early 20’s and drawn to NYC, I remember a mentor of mine saying “The city is an evil place, but around it is a shield of glory.”  Maybe that is why- God’s plan has always been in the city- it’s full of the people he says he loves.

“There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”  This is probably the most quoted part of the 21st chapter of Revelation- pretty self-explanatory.

What stuck out to me today as I looked at this chapter and try to fathom something fathomless because it is so foreign to any life we know here- was that it says there will be no sea.  No sea.  I wondered why- people love the ocean- it’s considered a symbol for God’s vastness- it’s beauty is striking.  But it comforted me- under the circumstances I find myself in- no sea.  And then I thought of how major cities are established near waters and these harbors often divide people and countries.  And I thought about how the sea literally divides us- how you died across the sea.  How far away you were- and how unnatural that was to me.

And I think about Pangea- the way our continents were once joined together- and fit together like the pieces of a puzzle.  Will the new order be something like this? Will the puzzle pieces come together?

It is impossible to put in earthly terms I suppose since the very nature of it is a different, new earth.  But I imagine since this was the flawed world- it may maintain some of the beauty we love, but without those flaws.

If you’ve got a Starbucks in your hand and you’re heading home to see your loved ones, thinking about a new earth and a new order- not that interesting.  Once your life is pricked with sorrow- as mine is, you start to notice the sorrow of the world- not just your own.  And then you get hungry- hungry for a new heaven and a new earth…the one that is coming…if…
if it’s all really true.  In my being, I believe it.  I can only be hungry because my body needs food.  Even an infant, who has never eaten except intravenously through the placenta, cries for what it knows it needs.  Certainly, there is something better than this.