Monday, March 30, 2009

We Cannot Forget

In Joni Eareckson Tada's book, Heaven, she quoted Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist:

"'I had a sense, sometimes enormously vivid, that I was a stranger in a strange land; a visitor, not a native...a displaced person.... The feeling, I was surprised to find, gave me a great sense of satisfaction, almost of ecstasy.... Days or weeks or months might pass. Would it ever return--the lostness? I strain my ears to hear it, like distant music; my eyes to see it, a very bright light very far away. Has it gone forever? And then--ah! the relief.... The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland.'"

Then Joni wrote:

"His words could have been mine as I wheeled through the Thousand Oaks Mall yesterday. ....I did not feel at home in that mall. I did not belong. I saw its world as trite and commonplace. Mind you, I didn't view the people as banal or boring; if anything, my heart went out to the kids hanging around the video parlor and the ladies watching the fashion show. The troubling part was the 'world' in which they were engrossed.... My heart especially went out to a teenage girl in jeans and plaid shirt who was staring enviously at the gaunt figure of a female mannequin who stared back at her through lifeless eyes. That said it all.

I couldn't help but see something past this world.... Because faith is double-sided. It not only verifies heaven as real, giving hard and fast reality to that which we do not see, but it also makes us look differently at visible things on earth."