of heaven and the heavens...

news item: strong leonid meteor shower expected this weekend

one of the neatest things i ever did in my first year as a youth ministry intern while a student at new orleans baptist theological seminary, was to take the group out to the country, away from the city lights, and watch a meteor shower. actually, my friend and mentor ron, who was the youth minister, did the taking... i was just along for the ride. having lived my first 17 years in jersey city, with nothing resembling " out to the country" for miles around, i never knew what the night sky really looked like. a couple of times when i was in elementary school they'd take us on a field trip to the new york planetarium, and we'd sit in these recliners and they'd project a night sky show onto the domed ceiling... and my response would be "how fake is that? you cant see that stuff in the sky for real!" meteors, comets, and shooting stars were things of fairy tales and science fiction. it would be years before i came to appreciate just how much of the heavens are hidden behind light pollution.

that first time i lay down in the middle of a field and watched that meteor shower, i was dumbstruck! who knew?? i'd lived 33 years before i saw my first shooting star. and i havent missed a year of leonid since. i pastored 4 youth groups in the next 12 years, and every year i took my group and drove until the lights of the city were far behind, and we'd just look up and watch... i never had a single group of kids that werent awestruck by the magnificence of God's creation. and every year since i've been at the children's home, i've gone outside and watched... and i'd take a group of kids out with me if they could stay awake that long.

and yet, as awesome as the heavens are to our human senses, the best is yet to be seen! in the book of revelation, the apostle john attempts to give us just a glimpse of what he saw of that magnificent place. rick ousley, pastor of the church at brook hills outside of birmingham, AL spoke at the louisiana youth evangelism conference a number of years ago, and he said that when he was a kid, he would go in the summertime to visit his grandmother. her house was built on the side of a hill, and the ground sloped away from the house, leaving ample crawl space underneath the back porch, and rick would crawl up under the porch to hide or play. one night while lying out under a star-filled sky with his dad, rick asked him what he thought heaven was like. his dad replied by asking what the floorboards of his grandmother's back porch looked like when he would crawl up under there. rick described how they were all dirty, with rusty-looking nails sticking through. there were dead bugs and spider webs all over... it was pretty yicky. and his dad pointed up to the sky above them and said "son, i'm not sure what heaven is going to be like, but there's the bottom of heaven's floorboards, and it just gets better from there."

sunday night, i'll be somewhere out of town... away from the lights of monticello checkin' out heaven's floorboards... wondering what it'll be like to tread on the top-side some day.