Five More Minutes

The kitchen was not nice. She wants to be clear about that, because people get sentimental and it was not a nice kitchen.

The lino by the back door had lifted and never got fixed. There was a radio on the sill that only got one station properly. The kettle took a long time and her mother would stand there with her hand flat on the counter waiting for it, saying whatever she was saying, and the light came through that one window in a particular way at about four in the afternoon in the winter.

That is what she wants. Not heaven. Four in the afternoon, the bad kitchen, the lino, her mother's hand flat on the counter, and five minutes.

She has been given a great deal of good material about eternity in the last year. Her church has been kind and her aunt has been better than kind. She has been told about the resurrection and the new creation and being with the Lord, all of it true, none of it wrong, and every single time she has thought the same disgraceful thing:

I do not want the universe. I want the kitchen.

She is thirty nine and she is a believer and she has not said that to anybody, because she is fairly sure it means something is wrong with her. That she is shallow. That she has not understood the size of what she has been given, and is holding out for a smaller thing like a child refusing a house because she wants the box it came in.

Sit down. That is not what is wrong with you, and it is not shallow, and there is an answer to it that is not a telling-off.

God has never been embarrassed by bodies and kitchens

Here is the thing you were not told, and it changes the whole shape of your embarrassment.

The hope in Scripture is not that we escape into something abstract. It is a resurrection. That is a physical word and it was chosen on purpose, and the whole New Testament is stubborn about it in a way that has annoyed philosophers for two thousand years. The Spirit could have inspired something vaguer and did not.

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!Isaiah 26:19

Bodies. Dust. Awake. Singing, which requires lungs and a throat.

And then look at what Christ does after His own resurrection, which is the pattern for the whole thing. He shows people His hands. He asks whether there is anything to eat. He cooks fish on a beach at breakfast time for men who have been out all night, and He is the risen Lord of glory doing it, and nobody in the account finds it beneath Him.

So take your kitchen out of the shameful pile. You are not being shallow, and what is written has God promising bodies and dust and singing rather than a mist, and the Spirit inspired an account in which the risen Christ makes breakfast.

The want is the right size

Now the specific thing, which is that you want five minutes rather than forever.

That is not a failure to appreciate the offer. It is how love works and God knows it perfectly well, because He made it work that way. Nobody has ever loved a person in general. You loved a woman with a particular hand and a particular way of standing at a counter, and grief comes for exactly that and cannot be answered with a category.

Which is why the promise is not a category either. What is written does not say you will be with the redeemed. It says caught up together with them, and the them in that sentence is not an abstraction, it is people, and it was written to a church who wanted their own specific dead back.

There is a reason none of this can be argued away, and you should stop trying. You are not asking for the wrong thing. Nothing written anywhere treats a longing for a particular person as a spiritual immaturity, and the Spirit put the word together into that passage because He knew what people actually want.

Here is the other half of it, and it is worth holding gently because nobody can verify it. What you are longing for in that kitchen is not really the lino. It is being known, and being at ease, and having nothing to explain, in a room where somebody was entirely on your side. Whatever the new creation is, it is not less than that. God is not going to hand you an eternity with less warmth in it than a bad kitchen in the winter.

What this longing is for

One more thing, and it is the part that turns the ache into something you can carry.

The longing is not the problem to be solved. It is the evidence. Something in you was built for a permanence that this world does not supply, and the ache you feel at four in the afternoon is that mechanism working correctly rather than failing.

People try to argue themselves out of that ache and it does not work, and it is not supposed to work. It is a compass, not a fault.

And it is worth noticing how Scripture handles people in exactly that position. It does not scold them for wanting. It gives them language for it. Half the Psalms are somebody saying how long, and not one of those is corrected in the text; they were kept, and set to music, and handed to congregations to sing. A God who was irritated by longing would not have preserved a songbook full of it.

You are allowed to want it and to wait. That is written into the whole shape of the hope in Scripture, where the faithful are described as people who saw the promise from a distance and were not ashamed of wanting it, and the Spirit is called a deposit precisely because the rest of it has not arrived yet.