A Nonfictional World

I like fiction. I enjoy reading novels as much as the next guy (okay, probably more than the next guy). And not just novels, but plays, poems, you name it. Fiction is a huge industry -- has been for centuries. People love stories, and they especially adore stories which let them lose themselves in another world and escape this one. I'm not suggesting things like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia are the only "other worlds," however. Any world is another world, whether you're climbing through a wardrobe or seeing an ordinary life through someone else's eyes.

As a kid with a pretty vivid imagination, I would often create my own worlds, too. We all do. It's how we escape reality.

But what if reality were better than any fictional world imaginable?

We are promised a perfect world. In the age to come, Christians will enjoy their citizenship in a heavenly kingdom, a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem. We will take up residence in a place free from sin and sorrow. No temptation, no evil, no death, no tears, no scraped knees, no cancer, no pain, no war, no guns, no fighting, no arguing, no hunger, no poverty, no need, no crime, no injustice, no inequality, no hate. It will be totally and utterly perfect. And by "perfect," I mean, well, perfect. And nothing will ever be imperfect again.

We will be home. At long last, we will finally be home.

The ending of the story of this world is the beginning of the story of eternity. It's the first page of the tale of the greatest world ever made, a world from which we will never desire escape or diversion.

Oh, who will come and go with me? I am bound for the Promised Land!