Rocking Chairs & Roaring Fires

Sundays are long days now; this Lord’s Day, I spoke thrice and locked up the chapel a little before 7.45pm, returning home shortly after (I drove, rather than cycled on account of the weather). I brewed a pot of Earl Grey which I shared with a visitor who wished to have a talk, and for whose benefit I lit the fire and settled into my rocking chair. If a younger me had been told that the days were coming when I would like nothing more than sitting in an old chair sipping tea by a fire, he would have laughed unkindly. The picture is so ‘middle-aged’, boring, fogeyish; is this what life would become?

I must agree that the scene is not ideal; Earl Grey is not an evening drink, for I had run out of Ovaltine, and the local Co-op was charging £4.50 for a replacement jar, a cost which I refused to entertain. Otherwise, I was the happiest man in England.

Unbelievers might ask what we will expect to ‘do’ in heaven once we get there. If we told them it was like some kind of thrilling theme park, exotic beach holiday, or grand stately home, they might nod knowingly, if patronisingly. Yet the maturer a Christian I become, the more I realise that heaven will be fabulous for the simple reason that He will be there: the One who made us, loves us and gave Himself for us. He is all I want and He is all I want to see. Unbelievers will think this boring or disappointing, but they would, for they have never known Him or desired Him.

 “O my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without thee, it would be a hell; and if I could be in hell, and have thee still, it would be a heaven to me, for thou art all the heaven I want.”

-Samuel Rutherford