If Heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie, I don’t wanna go – Hank Williams, Jr.Heaven is not a place, but a consciousness of God. – AnonymousJesus answered him, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. -- John 14:23And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ … -- Acts 17:26-28 (emphasis mine)
In the quote from Acts, as Paul spoke upon the Areopagus in
Athens, we can catch a glimpse of how and why the Apostle was so successful in “turning
the world upside down”. All that those
non-Jewish people had learned, how they lived, their myths and poetry pointed
toward the One True God. The heart of
man is open. Paul offered them, not gods
atop Olympus, but God alive on the throne of their own being, present,
immediate, aware – the living God of love and mercy and righteousness.
We have the same need today.
Old men like me wax nostalgic for the world of the 1950s where another generation
recalled the 1920s. We are all, as the
old song cries, longing for home. The
people, the voices, the laughter, the food, the music speak to us and point us
to the One from whom we came and to whom we journey. Our little customs and traditions are signs
on the way. He is present in the way we
build our houses, in the hills we climb, in winter snows and summer rains, in
tribulations and hardships, in joys and triumphs.
Heaven will be a lot like Dixie for some of us, a lot like
the Ozarks for me. That which makes me
love these poor, rocky hills with their multiplicity of streams and little
secret springs is Heaven, for He made this path to lead me home.
