Had an unexpected lunch with a friend yesterday. Not many people pop over to Northern Ireland from the mainland but she was visiting with a choir who were singing in a competition in Bangor and when I heard she would be in Belfast we arranged to get together for a couple of hours.
Im not very good at keeping in touch with people. If it wasnt for facebook I dont think anyone would ever hear from me again. Even my own Mother complains that she has to do all the phoning ( sorry Mum) Its not that I dont like people - I really do! Its just...... oh, you know...all the usual excuses. But it is always lovely to reconnect with people when they pop up here and there and opportunities present themselves to bump into old friends again.
I was thinking about heaven yesterday. About how I hope it will be an opportunity to do a whole lot of eternal catching up with people :-) Not just those we have known and loved but those we have always had a secret yearning to know from history. A friend of mine lost her 20 year old daughter very suddenly a couple of years ago. Something which is helping her through the grieving is the thought that she will see her again one day in the not too distant future. Im not entirely sure how the heaven thing works. Enough people have been and come back to lead one to believe that there is indeed a chance to meet people again - and the bible does speak about the cloud of witnesses and those who have died in the faith etc. I suspect that when we get there,however, the overwhelming presence of God, the worship of the angels and the streets of gold might be higher on my list of priorities than catching up with any mere mortals I have known or want to know !
We dont spend too much time thinking about heaven these days. Compared with past eras when life was short and death was a constant possibility we live rather free from the possibility of eternity for huge chunks of our lives. But heaven is, after all, what Jesus died to open up for us. His death allows us access in to the presence of the Father now and eternally . He was prepared to endure the cross not just to forgive us our sins but to buy us that golden ticket. When life is hard and all a bit pointless - when God seems distant and everything is grey, we need to remember that this is not all there is. There is the promise of more. In fact this is just the birth pangs - the messy part, the difficult labour. Death is a delivery from this life to the next. And if we know who we believe then the next , whatever it looks like, is going to be fabulous. Cant wait!
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