Heaven First

Dave Brisbin 10.4.26 A woman told me she had remarried and was having trouble blending families. She had two small children. Her new husband had a huge black Labrador named Tucker. Tucker and the kids left no spot unspotted, filling the house while her husband was working or work-traveling leaving her to remember she was not a dog person, didn’t like dogs, especially this huge thing everywhere at once shedding and smelling…like a dog. When she couldn’t stand the smell and shedding another day, figured a bath should help. Only way she could think to manage it was to put Tucker in the shower, get in with him, start the water, and pour on the soap. Tucker loved it. Biting at the water, shaking it off, wiggling and leaning into her scrubs, everyone soaked. A few showers later, he was following her around the house, and a bond she never thought possible was revealed right under the surface of her discontent. Changed the way she approached everything. So… What if heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the beginning? What if heaven, understood as God’s approval and acceptance, isn’t awarded after our lives are spent and judged against standards that were never quite clear? What if we’ve lived whole lifetimes hoping to secure a heaven that has been right here all along, just under the surface of our uncertainty? Jesus says it’s not out there somewhere hiding, but within. No more waiting; it’s right here in this field—if we just sell all that obscures and buy the field. James says if we start acting as if this good news is true, we find that it is. Faith—acting as if—moves us from mere belief to trust. If heaven isn’t the end of our journey, but the beginning, if we were born non-rationally aware of the inseparable oneness of everything and then forgot in the rough play of growing up, then all of life is really just a remembering. Letting go of everything we learned in the forgetting. We started with heaven. It has never left us. We left it. Acting as if this is true, getting in the shower with the smelly dog is the first step to living heaven first, revealing a bond we never thought possible right under the surface of our fears.