Things Unseen

Tonight I picked up a book that I had read many years ago, before Jaelyn was born –“Things Unseen” by Mark Buchanan.  If there is one longing that death has placed in me, it is to be more heavenly minded.  There is a stronger desire for heaven when a loved one is there.  A few passages in the book caught my attention in the first two chapters that I read tonight.

“Heavenly-mindedness is sanity.  It allows us to endure life’s agonies without despair.  It allows us to see things from the widest possible perspective and in the truest possible proportions.”

I cannot begin to imagine the despair and depression that I would have without the hope of heaven.  This life would feel so pointless without the hope and promise of something better.

“Our deepest instinct is heaven.  Heaven is the ache in our bones, the splinter in our heart.  Like the whisper of faraway waves we hear crashing in the whorls of a conch shell, the music of heaven echoes, faint, elusive, haunting, beneath and within our daily routines.   . . .  All your longings – for the place you grew up, for the taste of raspberry tarts that your mother once pulled hot from the oven, for that bend in the river where your father took you fishing as a child, where the water was dark and swirling and the caddis flies hovered in the deep shade – all these longings are a homesickness, a wanting in full what all these things only hint at, only prick you with.  These are the things seen that conjure in our emotions the Things Unseen.”

While I have read this book before, it was before I suffered great loss in my life – it was before my brother’s death and before Scott’s death.  These passages didn’t stand out to me before.  How do I know?  The first time I read this book, I highlighted passages that caught my attention – these weren’t highlighted.  These passages really hit home as they truly put into words some of the feelings that I have had but didn’t know how to put to words.

After reading the first two chapters, I picked up a study Bible that wasn’t my usual go-to Bible.  Using the small concordance in the back of the Bible, I began flipping through to various scriptures on heaven.  At one point, the Bible fell open to an unrelated passage, revealing two pieces of notebook paper in Scott’s handwriting.  Scott had copied four scriptures on it – all about redemption and heaven.  Finding these papers, with Scott’s writing of God’s words on heaven just as I was searching for scripture on heaven, sent chills down my spine.  It felt like Scott was there with me talking about heaven.

John 14: 2 - “My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

1 Peter 1:3-5   Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade.  This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.