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Here and Then


          And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:6-7)

          This is one of those passages that might make one say, “Huh?” It’s Saturday morning. I’m sitting in my office, typing on my keyboard, watching the House Sparrows quibble about the few seeds left in the bird feeder, feeling guilty for not having taken more food out to them, and  listening to Grace work her way toward me for her bite of peanut butter toast. By the time you read this, it will be Sunday morning. I may have already written Monday’s blog entry about the next verse or two, fed the birds three or four times, given the dog at least two more bites of whatever other meals I have eaten, and be rushing around, getting ready for Church. Or, and this is even cooler, I might be dead, and you might have stumbled across an old blog on the internet. But if I’m (or was) here, and you are (or will be) here … the brain twists into pretzels at the thought. (Do they even still make pretzels in your present, future reader?)
          As a writer, and especially as a writer of speculative fiction, I might be a little more tuned into temporal anomalies than some. So let me try a simplified explanation Suppose that you have a home that has a central courtyard, and think of the courtyard as the present. When you go into the house, you are outside of time, in eternity. You can walk around the before, the during and the after, looking out windows to see what you will do, are doing, or have done depending on where you are in the house. In a very real sense, if you are in the courtyard, the fact that once you step from there, inside, you are in eternity means that even now, there is a you in eternity, seated in the heavenly realm
         I see no evidence that we can be conscious of what happens in the house while we’re in the courtyard, or that we can generally travel back and forth. But I can understand, using this analogy, how one can be simultaneously living in this world and time, and be seated with Him in the heavenly realms and not sense it.
          One of the ways people try to describe God’s judgment of us is to imagine watching a video of our lives. In our case, we could say looking out of the window into the courtyard  I’m not sure I agree with this -  and I especially hate the idea that everyone would be allowed to watch, because the way my mind works, that video would be all about the times I didn’t live up to God’s expectations and/or my own. (I suspect we would be disappointed about very different things. ) I mean, isn’t that what judgment is all about?
         What if it’s not? What if it’s not about, “and I screwed up there, and I sinned there, and I should have kept my big mouth shut there, and there, and there, and…” What if it’s about, well, what the poem Footsteps talks about? What if it’s a record of Jesus stepping in and kicking our enemies out, and Jesus rocking back and forth, holding us as we scream in our pain, and Jesus, bringing a friend back into our lives… What if it’s not about our failures, but His successes?

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