Heaven

When you think of heaven, what is the picture that comes to mind?  Do you see a medieval painting with rotund Cherubim lounging on clouds, far from the reach of man?  Is it more down to earth than that?  Where is God?  What does he look like? Is Jesus there?

In ancient Jewish cosmology, specifically in first-century Jewish culture, heaven was not a place that was distant.  It was all around them. It was in the atmosphere that surrounded them.  It was in the air that touched their skin and as close as their next breath.

Somehow over the next 2000 years, popular culture (though it is not popular anymore to consider these things) succumbed to an uninformed and two dimensional rendering of heaven.  It is a heaven that is far away - somewhere where we go after we die. Somewhere that has no impact on our thinking in the here-and-now grinding monotony of the every-day, in the secular life. It is safe to say that this is not the view Jesus held; after all he was human and to some extent, influenced by the culture he was born into.

What if we were to believe that heaven was as close as our next breath?  

I believe that it is all around me but separated from me by time: entwined in between the particles that surround me, that form together to make my physical body and all the space around it.  I think it is a place that exists outside the bounds of linear time, so that all of history is present to it at any moment.  And it could be present with us then, in the same space that we are in, but inaccessible to us because we are bound by the fourth dimension: time.  When I believe that, when I believe that heaven is all around me, I see parts of it bleed through into the present.  The purple of a new flower, the rain, the warm sun.  In my view, all of these things can be present in heaven because they exist here on earth, bound in time.  But heaven can access these moments all at once, and they all bleed together in what must be an overwhelming beauty.  And if we believed that, what would it do to our perception of our world.  If I can experience little glimpses of heaven in the present, why wouldn't I take a few moments and experience them?  And if I could participate in the grand plan of bringing heaven to earth, wouldn't I do it?  And if I could know that my creator is as close as my next breath and waiting for me to shed my earthly bonds and join him in the everlasting moment that exists just beyond my vision, wouldn't I love the world around me and the people in it even more?  I think that all these things happen when I think of heaven this way.  Heaven is so near us and so waiting to be revealed around us - when God is ready to bring us to it, or at the end of time, when he unleashes it here.