The Peaceful Valley

"Lord take me home
To the peaceful valley
Down the winding river
To your city of souls
I've grown so tired
And my hearts too heavy
To walk any longer
To your cities of gold

All my life I've longed for forgiveness
But I can't ever seem to get enough
All my life I've been rocked into the darkness...

Trying to find a peaceful song
Trying to find a peaceful song
To sing when everything goes wrong
Till the peaceful valley calls me home"

-Ryan Adams

There is a cemetery just south of our house where the kids and I like to walk and ride bikes. When I walk out my front door in the morning and head to the left I can see the military portion of the cemetery; the tombstones of soldiers from the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II and the Korean conflict lined up in procession, cresting and dissapearing over a gentle rise. Seeing those tombstones every morning is a handsome and needed reminder of the grim sacrifices made on a daily basis for our nation.

One thing that surprised me over a decade ago when I left home to strike out on my own was how hard life is. I don't know why this surprised me like it did, but it was a shock. I think the thing that surprised me, as it probably does most people was just how much work life is. As a youngster I guess I just assumed that once you got old you reached some point where you leveled off and then it was pretty much auto pilot from then on, till the landing. But at some point in my twenties, it dawned on me that everything is in a steady state of decline (home,car,body, holiness, relationships) and requires constant upkeep. So much work! As a young boy, I had always looked forward to Heaven, but once I realized how much work was between me and the grave, I was ready to throw in the towel. I'm sure you've probably felt the same thing from time to time so you understand me when I say this is not suicidal, but rather a weary mental submission to the inevitable. "Same sh*t, different day" and "no rest for the weary," that sort of thing. So I spent plenty of time daydreaming about Heaven, looking forward to the great escape. As I matured (slowly), my need for mental escapes grew fewer and fewer, but my basic frame of mind was still basically, "just grin and bear it, this too will soon pass, and then...ohhh! how glorious it will be!" As I walked through the graveyard last fall I still had a tinge of envy for those resting souls, the song by Ryan Adams excerpted above always running through my head.

Slowly over the last year my thinking has been transformed on the subject of Heaven. I read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell which kickstarted the process, and then recently read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis which completed my mental one-eighty. I can now say that I look forward to and even desire a long life, regardless of how hard, painful, or full of toil it may be. Jesus has invited us to join him in a grand adventure. And it is! He has shown me to view every hardship and pain as opportunity, and toil as a gift.

Here's Rob Bell in Velvet Elvis: (silencio John!)

"When we choose God's vision of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever. This is the life of heaven, here and now. And as we live this life, in harmony with God's intentions for us, the life of heaven becomes more and more present in our lives. Heaven comes to earth. This is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, "May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." There is this place, this realm, heaven, where things are as God desires them to be. As we live this way, heaven comes here...

The question wasn't, how do I get in there? But how do I get there here?"

Finally, here is C.S. Lewis as found in the absolute masterpiece, The Great Divorce:

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened."

So now, as I walk through that same cemetery where the trees are beginning to blossom, my prayer has changed from, "how long, oh Lord, how long?" to "God, I'm in. I want to fight down here, with these people, for as long as you'll let me, I'll take as much as I can get."

Everything has changed.