Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.
                                                 Ephesians 1:3-4 NASB

These verses describe the finished picture, the portrait of each of us that God has seen all along. Throughout our earthly lives, through our struggles and yearnings, through all our "becoming," he sees us as we will eventually come to be in Jesus, for all eternity.

Artists, I've always thought, possess some of that divine farsightedness, that ability to see things that are "not yet." After Dad Sherrill's death, John's mother had stayed on at Union Seminary as Dean of Women. I was getting out of the car there one day when Mrs. Van Dusen, wife of the seminary president, caught sight of two-year-old Liz.

"I'll do a pastel of her!" she announced.

This was not a lady you argued with. We set a date and Liz spent an itchy hour on the Van Dusens' sofa, sitting as still as a two-year old can. At last Mrs. Van Dusen handed me the finished product.

I tried to hide my disappointment. Mrs. Van Dusen's work was highly regarded; everyone had told us how lucky we were to be getting an original by her. But... this wasn't Liz at all! It was a little blond child, pretty enough, but certainly not a portrait. Still, respecting the artist, I had the pastel framed and hung it in the TV room where, as with any familiar object, I soon stopped seeing it.

Four years later, rearranging pictures in that room, I stared at the drawing amazed. There was Liz! Liz to the last detail-eyes, cheeks, mouth, hair, even her customary expression! Liz at age six. Invisible to me in the two-year-old. Evident to eyes that saw more.

I like to think of God holding the completed portrait of each of us in his hand, as he's held it in his mind from the beginning. Looking at the portrait of the person he is creating, and finding it good.

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
                                 Thessalonians 4:16 RSV

It hangs on the wall outside my study where I pass it a dozen times a day, a five-foot panel of linen depicting in needlework the resurrection of the dead. High in the sky a trumpet summons the faithful, who leave their graves and soar upward to the outstretched arms of Jesus. At the bottom of the panel is embroidered, 'Jezus Messias Wederkomst," Jesus the Messiah Comes Again.

The wall hanging is the work of an elderly Dutch lady who does needlework to raise money for Brother Andrew's current ministry to the Islamic world. It's her vision of the Second Coming when, the Bible tells us, Jesus will reappear on earth and the dead will rise. Our "Easter Day," C. S. Lewis called it in the poem he composed as his wife's epitaph:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field and forest,
as they were reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hope that she
Re-born from holy poverty,
In Lenten Lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

When will this Easter Day occur? When will Jesus come again? For two thousand years Christians have asked this question. "Hereafter" is the most Lewis or anyone else can say. For the Bible also suggests that, for an individual, death and Easter may occur simultaneously. "Today," Jesus told the repentant thief who was dying with him, "you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). When will the dead arise? Maybe the when of heaven, like the where and the how, has no answer we can understand.