Golden Streets on Black Ashphalt (Heaven On Earth)

I was reading Andrew's blog the yesterday, and then my devotions last night, and they were both about the same thing: Heaven on Earth.. and I just thought that was really cool. It seems that is happening to me a lot lately. I will learn something new and then it will come up again and again and again. And I'm like WHOAH!!! Total God-Thing! So I kind of came up with this blog. I wrote most of it last night at midnight, just random thoughts that were in my head, so I hope it makes sense!


Heaven and Hell are obviously two VERY different places and there are hundreds of things we could point out that show that. But I think the biggest difference between the two is this: God is in Heaven and not in hell. The thing that makes Heaven Heaven is not the golden streets or the celestial beings. The thing that makes Heaven Heaven is the fact that God is there. It is God's home, where he sits on his throne. Without God, there would be no Heaven.

So, if God is in our hearts, then isn't there also a piece of Heaven on Earth? 


How about this: everytime we open our hearts, everytime we take compassion on someone, everytime we forgive, everytime we give a little more, everytime we lay ourselves in the background and allow God to manifest himself in our lives, people get a glimpse of Heaven on Earth.

Take me for example: technically I have had God in my heart since I became a Christian, so about 13 years. But I have only been really opening up my heart and letting God take hold of me for the past 4 months. There is a huge difference between Heaven and hell and you don't have to wait until eternity to find out what that difference is. One has God, one doesn't. One is life, on is death. One is peace and true joy, one is confusion and sorrow. Our lives on Earth are much like that. We can either live our lives as Heaven on Earth, or live our lives in hell. Let's go back to the example of myself again: I have had what would seem to most people as a perfect life: amazing family, great friends, good marks, decent job, enough money to buy what I want and enough food on the table every night for dinner. But though God was in my life and I had all the things that I needed, I wasn't opening my heart to God or to anyone else. See some things in life had left me a little jaded. People betraying me, lies, hurts- things that I wasn't letting go of, things that I wasn't giving to God. And because my heart was closed, God was 'in my life' but he wasn't IN my life. Therefore, I was living a life that was like hell.

I don't ever think that life can be perfect. People screw up, WE screw up. Things happen that we can't explain. But I think that we can still have Heaven on Earth, no matter how tainted the world may seem.
Andrew said that "sometimes we mistake the earth for the world." And I agree with that 100%. God created the earth to be a physical Heaven on which we could live and worship him. But the people of the world mess(ed) it up. I think that the reason that so few people experience Heaven on earth is because they dwell on the world and how imperfect it is and then fail to see creation and how amazing it is. If we close our hearts to that which is bad and choose to put up walls and look at the world from a cinical point-of-view, than aren't we also closing ourselves off to that which is good? Don't the bad things help us to appreciate that which is good? Sometimes, we miss out on what we could have because we dwell on what we don't.

The thing is, you have to work to get into Heaven. It isn't a joy-ride. Jesus said that the path would be hard. We're walking the narrow road here, and I'm sure it has a ton of twists and turns. (Good thing about hell: you don't have to work to get there-bad thing: when you get there, you'll wish that you had worked a heck of a lot harder). Being happy isn't a joy-ride either. You have to work to be happy. Trust me, I've been cynical, depressed, and hateful, and it wasn't to hard. I just decided to hate things that were bad and hurtful and not do anything about it. To just sit there and be all gloomy cuz the world wasn't what I wanted it to be. But that life was hell for me. It was dark, and hateful, and every single day I wanted to get out and find some happiness. And once I decided to open my heart and truly let God in, once i decided to work, to TRY, to let go, to accept, to forgive, to love, to smile and not let life get the best of me: thats when I experienced Heaven for the first time. And hey! Look at that, I'm still on earth!


Life will never be perfect but you can turn the black ashphalt of this world into the golden streets of Heaven by opening up your heart and allowing yourself to see things through God's eyes. Once you work at it, once you try and help others and you decided that smiling is better than dwelling on things you can't change-thats when I believe you will experience Heaven. Why let the imperfect things in life stop you from seeing things in a new way? Why let them stop you from making life everything it can be? Heaven.


"I would rather work every day of my life being hurt, going through trials and learning new ways to deal with them. I would rather try to overcome the impossible and fail, than to sit on my porch swing at my big blue house with my white picket fence and watch as life passes me by, all the while being angry at the world for all the things it did to me and didn't do for me. Life does not dicate the depth of my happiness, but my desire to have happiness dictates the depth at which I live my life."