Heaven

I think heaven will look like Lisa Frank art.

            Maybe some people will think a comparison like that cheapens heaven’s value or sacredness. But I don’t.

            I spent some time today coloring with patients in peds. The book we were using had one of the Lisa Frank trademark pictures on the front: A mother horse and her baby nuzzling each other affectionately. But they both had purple manes. And the baby was white with a spattering of rainbow colored spots across her back.

            I know, you’re probably thinking, “How did you get from multicolored mares to heaven Miki? It seems like a far jump to me.”

Maybe I should explain a little. A baby, about one year old, came to the nutrition center last week. He weighed in at the -3^rd standard deviation for malnutrition. In other words, he was extremely malnourished. He was sent to the hospital where he received full rounds of medication for several different ailments and then sent back down to the nutrition center today to receive the enriched milk formula they give out. He got there right before I left, so I only saw him for a few minutes. His body was so emaciated he literally had no padding on his backside. Where plump baby buns are supposed to be, he had nothing but saggy skin. The expression on his face told the world that he didn’t care about anything anymore. I found out this evening that he died before he left the nutrition center. I wasn’t too surprised.

            So today, when I looked at Lisa Frank’s rainbow colored horses, maybe I was just ready to find something unrealistic to cling to. Maybe the horses in heaven won’t actually have rainbow colored spots or purple manes, but I bet they’re a lot more amazing than what we imagine them being. Maybe, with our new and improved eyesight in heaven, we’ll actually see that horses are more colors than just brown, black, white, and palamino. (If you’re a horse fanatic, please forgive me for not being specific on the different names…) Maybe we’ll discover that so many of the things we think are realistic on Earth simply aren’t realistic at all. Things like loneliness, pain, tears, and depression. And here in Tchad there seem to be even more things that are simply facts of life. Children starving, babies dying, women being beaten by their husbands, corruption in government: these are all tolerated here as completely ordinary.

            I believe that heaven will be anything but ordinary by human standards. I believe that everything will be far better, brighter and more colorful than anything we have ever witnessed before on this earth. I believe that it will be completely unrealistic, but in being so it will be the most real and amazing thing we could ever hope to imagine.

            I believe that heaven will look like Lisa Frank art.