I'm ready for the Day when all things will be made right again and there will be only gains. When there will be no more separation - no miles or missteps between us...only Love: more and more Love. When there will be no more disintegration of relationships - only wholeness, only pure restoration.
I long for a Day when words are used to do what they were always meant to do: to build up and not tear down...or attack or slander or gossip. When no girl or woman has to feel afraid to walk down a street by herself. When all this striving and struggle and mere survival is over...and we can finally. just. rest.
I long for the Day when we can all just be together. Forever just praising Him - with no denominational lines or divisions of any kind between us...we won't be pointing fingers at each other because we'll be too busy lifting our hands up in worship of Him.
...a Day when we can hold our loved ones close...simply because we love them and not because we're afraid that they might be gone too soon. I long for this Day.
When every tear will be wiped away...and we will be able to see clearly and fully for the very first time that none of our pain was ever in vain. That it too was spun into a Glory-story that can never be erased, that we would in fact never want to be rewritten a different way...because we can finally see on that Day how the One behind it all - behind all of our stories - was spinning it into a greater Story than we could have ever, ever imagined for ourselves.
Don't you too want this kind of Day to come?
Aren't you longing along with me?
How can we possibly hope...when there is still so much pain in this world and every step forward seems to also mean another step forward into seeing yet more brokenness and sadness all around us and in our own lives too?
I don't have answers, but I do know this: I must worship.
But how can one worship here and now?
But how can we not? If we are to offer something different, something other than this seemingly all-consuming darkness that fills our world...how can we unless we gaze into His face and His nature and call it good? How can we offer light unless we gaze into the Light and let our faces become radiant with His glory? ("Those who look to Him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed" - Psalm 34:5)
And I admit - I find it hard most days and I wish it wasn't such a struggle...but it is, just as painful as extracting teeth or as arduous a process as when a seed grows and fights its way to the surface until it eventually finds the light...because there are these lies entrenched deep within me that rear their ugly heads in adversity, that say "God isn't good, at least not to me and because of x, y, or z (or when all of them happen together at once), I can't praise Him, He doesn't deserve it, in fact He must be trying to play some dirty trick on me..." And yet...there's this: the image of a suffering Christ - the perfect Son of God - hanging on the cross for me, for my sake, in my place...and in light of this, can I possibly dare to claim that He doesn't deserve all of my praise and worship and honor and everything else...or that I deserve a "better" life than this??
No.
Certainly I can scream and cry and wail and ask the why questions (why me? why now? why this?)...but never do I hold any right or entitlement to raise my fist against Heaven, against the One who made me, created me, and saved me when I was dead in my sins. I have, after all, seen Him do it a million times - how He has raised me up in the darkest times, how He has kept me upright and walking, even dancing, when I had no strength of my own, how He has kept me close and redeemed my pain in ways unimaginable to me at the time, how He has been my One and Only Constant Keeper and never left my side, no, not once...and I will see Him do it again.
Not because I can...but because He will.
And this is His will: that I might see His Love and goodness - both in the pleasant times and the hard, in the healing and in the wrestling, in the change and in the fruit of that change, in the dry seasons and those that are filled with endless wells of cleanest, freshest water...yes, I will see Him still. I will see Him again...and again...and again.
And that Day will come...as sure as the sun rises in the morning. For He has promised, and He who promises is faithful. His word will never return void.
One Day, on that Day, we will all be together and all of this trouble will be as a passing dream...for He will be with us - we will be standing with Him face-to-face: our Reality, the Truth, our Everything.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And He who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” -Revelation 21:1-5