Other Things Leave Me, but Heaven's Joy Abides

The Volcano Lodge, Kilauea, Hawaii

Rachelle and I had dinner last Friday night (June 3) at the Volcano House Lodge on top of one of the most active volcanos in the world, Mount Kilauea, Hawaii. Being a history buff, I found it ironic that exactly 150 years earlier, on June 3, 1866, Mark Twain ate dinner at the exact same Volcano Lodge and returned to the mainland to make a living describing the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) to Americans who knew little to nothing about the place America now calls our 50th state. As an aside, beside the fireplace at the Volcano House is a "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" page from the year 1935. It says that the fire "at the Volcano House has burned without going out for 66 consecutive years," which means that the fire that burned in that fireplace in 1866 when Mark Twain visited had not been allowed to die out for nearly seven consecutive decades.

Mark Twain became the de facto expert on all things Hawaiian. On one particular occasion while speaking to a baseball team in America upon the team's return from the Sandwich Islands, Twain vividly described his personal love for Hawaii. The vivid language he used could very well be a description of  heaven. Contrary to dispensational teaching which says this earth will be consumed in a fireball at the end of a millennial reign of Christ, I take Jesus words' "The meek shall inherit the earth" literally. The prophet Isaiah spoke of "the world without end," and it seems to me that at the Resurrection, the earth - which continues to groan waiting for it's redemption - will find the curse reversed. Nothing could be more enjoyable than exploring the world (and possibly other worlds) with the family of Christ in eons to come.

Contemplate Twain's vivid description of Hawaii and ask yourself if it doesn't cause you to anticipate heaven. We all have purpose in this life, but if our hope in Christ is for this life alone, then we are to be most pitied above all people (I Corinthians 15:19). I believe a daily meditation on heaven will carry all of us through our daily problems on earth.

"No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me the balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its wildland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”