Teleported to Glory

In the next couple of weeks, we are going to have our first visitors from home, coming out to our adoptive country. Dee’s mother, brother, and sister-in-law-to-be, will be on their way back from a trip to Australia, and on the way to Ireland will stop off with us in South Asia for a week.

As I mentioned recently, Dee and I had very different upbringings as regards travel. My father, being a language teacher, loved to bring us around Europe and the world, and some of my earliest memories are holidays in foreign lands. Even at a young age, our dad used to send us to ask for directions to shops etc., and try to remember what was said, or write it down… all in a language not our own. Learning to relate to different cultures has always been a part of my life, and maybe part of the reason that as a quiet, nerdy kid, my few friends in school or university were often the foreigners. I don’t know.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, is from rural Ireland, married to a farmer, and as far as I’m aware has never travelled outside of the British Isles. The other night, we were talking about her going to Australia, and even further, arriving into the chaos of South Asia. I mentioned to Dee that I just don’t have the framework to understand the manner of emotions that must course through one’s being, under the sensory assault of entering another culture for the first time.

After 60 years in one place, to suddenly be dropped into an overwhelming attack of chaos, noise, strong, unusual smells, language, vastly different architecture and urban planning (though planning might be a little strong of a word), and more chaos, is no small thing. I just can’t imagine what it will be like for her to experience something that intense for the first time, without any prior exposure to similar situations. It’s incredible really. One moment, you are in your own culture, not even noticing things around you, for you swim in it as a fish in water. A quick couple of flights away, and all of a sudden you are teleported into a whole new reality, where you notice everything, and have no idea how to interact with it.

In this new reality, there are many things the same. People are there, they still smile, frown, buy things, sell things, eat together. There are things that are similar, like food and buildings, and weather. They’re just altered somewhat, some slightly more intense, some slightly less. Then there are the things that are just plain different. Sights and sounds and experiences that you have just never encountered in your life.

As I considered this, I thought about how this same event will one day happen to all of us in a far greater measure. C.S Lewis points to this in his essay The Weight of Glory, where he encourages us to think about each other in a new way.

“The load, or weight, or burden of my
neighbour’s glory should be laid daily
on my back, a load so heavy that only
humility can carry it, and the backs of
the proud will be broken. It is a serious
thing to live in a society of possible
gods and goddesses, to remember that
the dullest and most uninteresting
person you talk to may one day be a
creature which, if you saw it now, you
would be strongly tempted to worship,
or else a horror and a corruption such
as you now meet, if at all, only in a
nightmare.

All day long we are, in
some degree, helping each other to one
or other of these destinations. It is in
the light of these overwhelming
possibilities, it is with the awe and the
circumspection proper to them, that
we should conduct all our dealings
with one another, all friendships, all
loves, all play, all politics. There are no
ordinary people. You have never talked
to a mere mortal.”

The fact of what will be ought to change our perception of what now is. How we view other people, how we view the trials of life, how we prepare for entering the true city of God. And certainly, like anyone travelling to a different country, we should prepare as much as we can, for the incredibly different reality that awaits. As Leonard Ravenhill said, “I want to so live that God doesn’t have to have to give me one minute’s notice to step out of time into eternity.”

But prepared as we ought to be, on that day each of us will suddenly be transported into a reality that is far more different than any culture on earth is to another. We will be utterly transformed, in a gloriously transfigured existence. And yet, there will be some things that remain the same. The fruit shares the essence of the seed, though it be in form completely different. We shall recognise certain things as they were, only they will be more real than they ever were before. Other things we shall recognise as similar, but as the greater reality of the things we longed for on earth. And yet other things still, shall exist in a way that we could never have imagined. I can’t envision what it will be like for my mother-in-law to go from Ireland to South Asia. But even more so I cannot imagine what it will be like to enter eternity. To simultaneously be over-awed in wonder at what is new, and yet feel more at home than ever before.

This is what lies ahead. And I can’t wait.

“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body…

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body…

Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven…

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.”

– 1 Corinthians 15: 35-53 (selected)