Your Kingdom come here to earth.

Adam and Eve were never bored in the garden, I know they had business to attend to. I used to imagine that they would work with gold dust and lumps of silver, polishing stones into clear jewels and stringing the trees with what they made, so that when God came to walk with them in the cool of the evenings He would find the pathways of their garden lined by their baubles, put there to catch the amber light for Him.

The resurrection of Christ has ushered in the New Creation, as Dr. Hunt said again today. I don't think that this world is a waiting room that we are trying to coax all non-believers into so at the return of Christ, we will take them with us when this planet is abandoned for a city in the clouds. I don't know where Heaven will be - maybe a city in the clouds, maybe the exact same earth we have just restored by new Words from the mouth of the one who first made it - but I do know that we as a church may have slipped into idleness like the Galatians. Not an idleness that keeps us from spreading our news of salvation, but we cannot stop our cultivation of the earth just because we have come to think that it will be destroyed at the second coming. Paul chastised the Christians in Galatia for this kind of attitude – and besides, isn’t sleep the sweetest, food most satisfying, leisure most precious and love most understandable when we are occupied with something good, that matters and is bettering?
"I would live in Your love."
If I am seeing love dimly through glass, and if that dim sight is as beautiful as it is, we are going to explode with the clear sight that will come.

I think I understand some of why we can't look at the face of God as we are now.

The thought of life as it is set right, sopping with the clear water of fresh youth...that is not something I really want to wait around for.


I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that
recedes;

I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul
as it leads.


I am sorry I keep repeating poets, but how beautiful is that? So much of Sara Teasdale's work is written to me like a Psalm that I want to capture and hum inside myself, for the God whom I love to hear - even as He is not the one she meant.
It reminds me even more of the responsibility that I have been charged with, to be the devoted culture maker that Calvin Seerveld exhorts us all as people of faith to be. My pretty friend Tala let me borrow a book of his, and each page is so laden with wisdom that it feels like putting apple marzipan in your mouth; it tastes delightful but the richness forces you to put it away for awhile until your tongue has taken in the sweet and let it settle. I have to reread at least twice to keep from letting it all walk right back out the front door of my memory.

That itch I have spoken of before, that discontent which won't allow me to resign my passion for obedient, love-driven art into simply decorating the walls of a church or painting an illustration of David and his flock, has begun to show its purpose. Reading Rainbows for the Fallen World by Seerveld and Walking on Water by L'Engle has watered the root growing in me, so that the green tips of a baby life-mission have started pushing up.
The thing that ultimately made me want to study Fine Arts at Gordon was a paragraph in the department's policy on undraped models. "Christians ought to reclaim cultural territory surrendered to their secular counterparts and to redeem this territory for Christ's glory. ... Great artists of the past have used the human figure. Contemporary Christians should reclaim it for God and His purposes as a means to leaven popular culture. "
This is exactly what Seerveld talks about when he challenges older Christians who scorn the novels, films and song lyrics which saturate every modern minute with godlessness, but yet who are not encouraging the aesthetic work of their younger believers – and so the artistry of secularism reigns. As he says, “Such evocative human activity as art is must be sanctified, and must be sanctified by believers who are not dabbling but who are given christian training to know what they are doing. And that is a mission which marks a grown-up body of Christ.”

I remember once my Dad and I listening to the resplendent, haunting voice of Sarah McLachlan, and as she lifted it into a soaring high note he said, "If that can be so beautiful on earth, imagine what heaven will be like?"
I am so saddened that such artistic voice, lips and fingers like Sarah's are absolutely glimmering in the image of our Musician and yet might not join in with the generations of eternity. I am saddenned she is not singing for Him right now.

I wish we didn’t have to turn on christian radio stations for the ‘message,’ but any other for good music. I wish the garish advertisements that aggravate everything we touch and look at would be injected with some integrity. I wish the New York Times best seller’s list was chock full of masterful literature by proficient writers, who make a living by their service under God’s restoration agenda. Is the world really any different because of Grace? Do they know we are Christians because we, together, look like heaven on earth?