I kind of have a thing about the night sky. I mean, one of my latest projects is called Operation Stars, my first book cover featured not one, not two, but three moons, and everybody knows you can only see the Second Star to the Right after nightfall. That's not Peter Pan fangirling, it's just science.
Something about the stars inspires me on a deeply spiritual level. It's as if God allows us our illusion of control during the day, when the only visible world is the one mankind has scrubbed its grubby hands all over. But after nightfall, the veil draws back. The illusion becomes nothing more than a shadow beneath the vast, unfathomable mystery of Creation beyond our reach and beyond our understanding.
I love everything that we don't know about the galaxies and galaxies above us. I love that the glory of the stars belongs to God and no one can prove otherwise. I love that written in the stars is a promise to those who look up in search of God that He can always be found somewhere, in an infinity of light that the darkness cannot touch.
Stars guide the heart toward spiritual things. Something about them seems to strip away material reality and leave behind the questions of deeper eternal meaning. Who is God? Where is heaven? Is this world really all there is?
For the believer, they sing of our Creator, they tell us of His glory, they show us how to shine in the dark, they remind us of how small we are in the grand scheme of things, and they do something else as well. They stand as symbols of the glory we will one day know as children of God, coming into His home.
Heaven is a tangled concept for many of us. I don't personally have a taste for gold and pearls would never be my jewelry of choice, let alone my ideal gate-building material. I'm not really a city gal, animal hybrids freak me out a bit, and if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm riffing on a rigidly literal interpretation of Scripture and probably COMPLETELY misunderstanding what heaven will actually be like.
We have tiny, finite, orthodox little minds, don't we? As much as we flaunt the creativity of mankind, we cannot fathom the glory that waits for God's children on the other side of the grave. We get caught up in the metaphors, in the details, in the questions; we get so tangled up in but what will it LOOK like? that we forget—the custom craftsman of the stars is the same architect of our eternity. Do we really think He needs us to tell Him our preferences? Do we really think He doesn't know what glory means to each of us?
Do we really think that God doesn't know how to throw a glorious eternal homecoming?
The sun has one kind of glory, while the moon and stars each have another kind. And even the stars differ from each other in their glory. ~I Corinthians 15: 41
The same God who clothed each celestial light in a unique robe of glory is designing an eternity for all of His children. For you and me. For us. We will not be disappointed.
The next time you find yourself questioning His craftsmanship and wondering if God's idea of glory will hold up to your standards, look at the stars.
I think it's safe to say that He does glory pretty well. Our eternities are in beautiful, masterful hands.
Man, this is good.