The Culture Shock of Heaven

I came across a file today with some of my old journal entries from about seven years ago. I'm going to share some here.

There’s a certain culture shock when entering the kingdom of God. The delights of heaven are not always the delights of earth. We enter into God’s kingdom at times expecting it to be run by the general rules of the here and now. Then God asks us to give up an earthly rule—maybe we have to give up our right to do whatever we want, maybe we have to give up our right to pride—and this process hurts. We yelp a bit at it. We complain to God. “Wasn’t this Christian life supposed to give me happiness?” We want to give up and get out during those times. But God says, “Wait. Trust.”

And so we wait. And after the initial shock the place becomes more comfortable. The terrain of God’s kingdom becomes familiar and then the day finally comes where we are such a part of God’s kingdom that the land that we came from seems dull, gray and boring by comparison. We no longer miss the “leeks and cucumbers” of Egypt. We traveled away, but we are no longer homesick. We recognize instead that what we left behind was not our home, but our exile.