The closest place to Heaven

"It was so beautiful, you didn't know where earth ended and heaven began." - Forrest Gump

I might be going to Switzerland for Summer Exchange! Woohoo! I was looking through some of the pictures of Switzerland as the Information Session was going on.





I was telling people," I might probably fall in love with the place that I don't ever want to come home anymore."

Phil 1:21-24
For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.

Why do you think people love to travel, love beautiful places like Switzerland. It's the closest thing to Heaven on earth.

I don't think I want to go. I might fall in love with the place. Yet there's still a battle to fight here. I can't leave. God will find me and get me back.

Paradise

From a really young age, I've been dreaming of heaven, even before I was a Christian. And from time to time the ache comes back. The homesick ache.


Ecc 3:11
He has set eternity in our hearts

I'm heading to Switzerland this summer, I hope. Close to heaven. Close, but never there. It will always evade us until we find the true Source.

I typed Paradise on my Google and went on Wiki to check it out.

Wiki:
Paradise is an idealized place in which existence is positive, harmonious and timeless. It is conceptually a counter-image of the miseries of human civilization, and in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, but it is not necessarily a land of luxury and idleness.

Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both.

In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead.

In Christian and Islamic understanding heaven is a paradisaical relief, evident for example in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus tells a penitent criminal crucified alongside him that they will be together in paradise that day.

In Native American beliefs, the other-world ia an eternal hunting ground.

In old Egyptian beliefs, the other-world is Aaru, the reed-fields of ideal hunting and fishing grounds where the dead lived after judgment. For the Celts, it was the Fortunate Isle of Mag Mell.

For the classical Greeks, the Elysian fields was a paradisaical land of plenty where the heroic and righteous dead hoped to spend eternity.

The Vedic Indians held that the physical body was destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the Third Heaven in a state of bliss.

In the Zoroastrian Avesta, the "Best Existence" and the "House of Song" are places of the righteous dead. On the other hand, in cosmological contexts 'paradise' describes the world before it was tainted by evil.

So for example, the Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace.

The concept is a topos' in art and literature, particularly of the pre-Enlightenment era, a well-known representative of which is John Milton's Paradise Lost.


He has truly set eternity in our hearts.

No culture, no man can run from that longing.

The Greatest Dignity of All

He enables us to love. He gives us the greatest treasure in all creation: a heart. For he intends that we should be his intimate allies, to borrow Dan Allender’s phrase, who join in the Sacred Circle of intimacy that is the core of the universe, to share in this great Romance.

Just as we have lost our wonder at the world around us, we have forgotten what a treasure the human heart is. All of the happiness we have ever known and all of the happiness we hope to find is unreachable without a heart. You could not live or love or laugh or cry had God not given you a heart.

And with that heart comes something that just staggers me.

God gives us the freedom to reject him.

He gives to each of us a will of our own.

Good grief, why? He knows what free-willed creatures can do. He has already suffered one massive betrayal in the rebellion of the angels. He knows how we will use our freedom, what misery and suffering, what hell will be unleashed on earth because of our choices. Why? Is he out of his mind?

The answer is as simple and staggering as this: if you want a world where love is real, you must allow each person the freedom to choose.

Happy New Year!

Hmm.

Happy New Year! =)

Man, I cannot find the motivation to write cos like I write once a week already for my Uni-Y Newsletter. Haha.

Anyways school's starting soon, but I'm really looking forward to a glorious 2009 ahead! =)