A Better Country

   Still the fair vision lives!  Say never more that dreams are fragile things.  What else endures, Of all this broken world, Save only dreams.  Anonymous-

   Dreams.  Hopes.  We all have hopes and dreams...I wishes, you know.  Where else can we live in a perfect world? 

   "In the mid-west you don't need air conditioned cars like we do here in Tennessee." 

  We needed to trade our little four-seat Pinto in for something that would allow us to seat the baby that was due in a few months. The car salesman was trying to bargain, and I don't know what dream world that car salesman was living in, but it wasn't reality. 

In the mid-west we have the pleasant possibility of weather that challenges the body and soul.  Not every summer is 'hotter-n-the journey to the center of the earth’...but that possibility is always there, along with the possibility of --in summer-- 100 degrees temperature, with100 percent humidity, that doesn't mean rain, it only means 100% miserable.  Not every winter is cold enough to freeze a fish's eye balls, but there is the possibility of thirty degrees --or less--below zero weather, and snow up to the top of the porch. 

   "I'm sorry I missed the blizzard," I say honestly to my brother-in-law.

   "I'm sorry you missed it too," he laughs. 

   He had been enlisted to do our 'chores' while we traveled to visit our daughter and her family. On our way home, we also caught a few days at the lectureship at the preaching school my husband had attended. We only got to watch the happenings from the television set. 

  The morning we left on our journey, we rolled out of bed about three o'clock in order to be ahead of the weather that the weather people warned was coming in.  We beat the 'weather' by about thirty minutes (give or take a few minutes) that day.  It chased us all the way south.  Storms and tornadoes cropped up behind us all the way to Georgia.  My brother-in-law sent pictures to my daughter's computer so that we didn't miss the blizzard completely. 

In years past when my daughter's neighbor saw pictures of our blustery state, she would say, “Why, would anyone live there?"  Now she sees a hunting show with snow and cold and, "Oh, she says, that's just Iowa."  As if it were the most logical thing in the world. 

     We missed that blizzard.  The interstate was shut down for several days.  We weren't sure we would be able to GET back in when we were due to arrive home.  During the storm there was enough snow th animals could (and some did) walk over fences into places they weren't supposed to go.  Yes, some folks still say, "Why would anyone want to live there?!" I suppose we are a bit crazy, but it is Iowa...and this is our home. 

  Hebrews 11:10,13-16 "For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 13) These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14)  For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. 15)  And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. 16)  But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.”

"This world is not my home, I'm just a passin' through", the song informs us, and although we are accustomed to this world we should never get to the point that we believe this world is all there is. That is a real problem. People become comfortable here, and they just settle in like this is home. God created a beautiful place called heaven, and it will be so much better there. But only if we prepare for it.

   "Daddy," the little girl says as she and her father gaze upward at the star studded night sky.

   "Yes, dear?"

   "If heaven is this beautiful on the 'wrong side' just think how wonderful it must be on the right side."