what/where is ‘right here?’

Rob Bell wrote something that affects the way I think about everything. It’s in his book Velvet Elvis:

God is not somewhere else. God is right here. It is God’s world and God made it and God owns it and God is present everwhere in it… God is always present. We’re the ones who show up.

This is a sentiment that I’ve always felt somewhere deep, but I lacked the eloquence to express it. I always thought that there was more to life than just following a list of rules so that an impersonal god sitting in a big huge chair somewhere watching us and shaking his head from afar would allow us to enter the gates and leave behind this “bad” world and join his “good” world. It just all seemed so… black and white. And from what I’ve learned, most of us live in the gray. David Crowder put it like this: “When our depravity meets His divinity it is a beautiful collision.” I think the world we live in is that collision. How else do you explain how so much beauty and so much misery can coexist on this planet?

This place we call home is heaven and it’s hell. I like to stay positive and talk about faith and hope and how they are all you need, but I’m also a realist. I’m aware that bad things happen to good people for what seems like no reason at all. But as Rob Bell talks about in his book, so much of what the Bible says about the end of our time flies in the face of what most of us have come to believe about it. It’s all about God coming here, not about us going there. Sure, there is something better in store for us at the end of this life. But I think it’s also important to bring more of heaven to us here. Right here.