“How is this possible?” He said, reaching out his luminous hand. The angel started and recoiled as his fingers touched the glossy surface of the palm frond. He laughed from the strangeness of the thing, “It’s like stepping into a song. What is it I’m feeling?”
“It’s life, a very great good.” God said, lifting His head from His work to look at the canopy of foliage swaying over their heads. The clearing in the grove was quiet with a kind of silence that had never been heard before—a peace punctuated by rustling leaves, chirping insects, and the echo of a far off bird’s song. God bowed His head again, returning to His craftsmanship.
The angel did not speak for a long minute, but watched with awe at the grand thing God was creating. Over the past days, the angel had celebrated with all of heaven as reality dawned in front of their infant eyes. Creation grew and expanded under the Master’s words like lightning flashing over a landscape—in the darkness it was sheer nothingness to the eye, but with the light came depth and shape which, now seen, one knew could have been anything else. Perfection was a cheap word to call creation; It was good.
“Lord…how do I say it…” The angel hesitated. God replied without looking up,
“You’re wondering about the different sizes of things on earth compared to heaven?”
“Yes! That’s it. From what I can tell, heaven is all wide spaces. How come earth has narrow places, like the sea and the planets, but then there’s huge spaces, like this garden and the man.”
God glanced up again from His work and looked through a gap in the foliage, where several yards away He could just see the dark shape of the man, curled up in slumber under a fruit tree. God laughed aloud, causing the trees around to shake and the grass to bud flowers,
“Can you believe the man sees shape and size differently than you? Surely you realize how dizzying it is for you to be here—how you always feel upside down?”
The angel looked at the turf under his luminous feet, and replied with active curiosity,
“You’re right. There is something very disorienting about being on earth.”
God smiled and let his fingers rake through the grass as He remained sitting in on the ground,
“Yes, to the humans the sea and the stars will be the largest things they can think of. Only with my help will they measure reality through goodness.”
The angel could not hide his confusion now, blustering and pointing down at the form God had been making in the dirt,
“You mean to say he won’t look at what you’re making here and see how vast and magnificent it is, but he’ll look at that little puddle of water called the sea and think it’s greater?”
God smiled knowingly and returned to his handiwork,
“Don’t be afraid. You won’t ever really understand, and that’s the way it’s meant to be. The humans are made different from you. They will see from earth and heaven at the same time because they will be joined to me.”
The angel stood for a long moment in silence, his head spinning. But instead of his confusion turning into frustration, his heart beamed with wonder such that, if he were a human, he may have begun to cry.
“This is truly bigger than anything I’ve seen before.” He said in a hushed tone, his head bowed, “But how will they be joined to you? How will they live in heaven and earth at the same time?”
God sat upright with a shining expression of satisfaction and excitement on His face. With the good-humored tone of someone with an unspeakably good secret, God replied,
“You yourself said it, being here is like being in a song. You were right, everything here has harmony with my goodness.” With that he stood up, and reached down toward what He had made and lifted her up by the hand. Standing in the morning light of the grove stood something new, something as cosmically vast as the man himself. To the angel’s eyes, she dwarfed him like a mountain, towering over him like the arching trajectories of planets and galaxies.
“Don’t ask me to explain how they’ll be joined to me…just watch the song unfold for yourself.” As God said this, He began to lead her by the hand. The angel looked, and saw the man was stirring from his sleep. As God brought her out to the man, it appeared to the angel that the whole scene in front of him flipped on its head and expanded to a new and unutterably vast scale, nearly wide enough to fit all of the wideness of heaven. He knew there had never been anything like it in all creation, whether on heaven or earth—the first stanza of a new kind of creation, one which would mediate heaven and earth.
The Next Great-Awakening Will Likely Begin in Immigrant Churches