Bringing Heaven Down To Earth

Bringing Heaven Down To Earth

Your unfailing love is as high as the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Psalm 57:10

When I was a boy, I would often lie on my back and stare up at the sky, counting the clouds as they floated by. Occasionally, I’d be startled out of my daydream by a fighter jet doing a flyover.

Craig Air Force Base was just a few miles from where I grew up. The base was used to train fighter pilots for the war in Vietnam. On any given day, a jet screaming by at lightning speed could disrupt a quiet, pastel sky. Sometimes the planes seemed no more than a few hundred feet above the ground. I could actually read the insignias as the jets flew overhead.

If I kept watching, they would sometimes do the most astounding thing: They would suddenly change trajectory and shoot straight up through the cumulus clouds until they disappeared near the darkness of the upper atmosphere. To me, it was nothing short of a miracle—though it may have been a technical miracle. The more I watched the pilots do their work, the more I began dreaming of becoming one myself.

For years, I’d heard preachers talk about how mighty the heavens are. They preached sermons on how God’s faithfulness could reach the clouds. I wanted to leave the bounds of earth and reach out and touch the face of God. A fighter jet seemed like the most logical step to get there. How else could a farm boy reach the heavens?

Years later, I pursued my dream, but I never managed to take off. When my eyesight proved faulty, I flunked out of flight school because I couldn’t see the clouds.

God was faithful, though, and he started a new work in my soul. On my journey to becoming a doctor, God revealed to me that heaven is not some faraway place beyond the clouds. Rather, it is a very real place that stretches back to us here on earth. We don’t have to run toward heaven and eternity because heaven is much closer than we realize. The veil between this world and the next is thin. We don’t have to run toward heaven because heaven walks alongside us here and now.

TODAY’S RX

We are much closer to heaven than most people think. Our last breath here will be our first breath there.

Lord, help me to remember that you aren’t a distant, faraway God, but that you’re present with me each day of my life, walking beside me until the day comes when I will see you face-to-face.