HEAVEN. The streets are paved with gold! One of the main things I’ve heard and repeated over and over to the point I have a certain image of what that would look like in my mind. But when we go beyond our own imagination and just take the words of John in Revelations describing heaven, or New Jerusalem, the beauty of heaven stretches way past anything we could ever fathom. There is no vision to represent the foundations of the walls all decorated with precious gems built surrounding the city. I imagine so high you can’t climb over them. The only way to enter is through the 12 pearly gates that by description gives the illusion of a gate of many pearls. Yet, in the uniqueness of heaven, its gates are all made of a single pearl each. Once you enter through one of those gates, they all converge into a main street made of gold. Gold so beautiful and pure that it’s transparent, like glass. There is a river flowing down the middle of the street and on either side of the river, is the Tree of Life. The fruit of the tree which will line either side of the street will continuously be available in abundance to heal the nations once and for all. Along that street are many mansions, and I imagine there are more than a few still waiting to be occupied. Heaven is a place that promises no more sickness or disease; no more hunger or thirst; no more death or sorrow; no more tears, for God himself, will wipe your tears away. There is no ne ed for a light or the sun or moon, because the glory of God and the light of the Lamb is all the illumination you need. There is no night, no darkness. Heaven: is there any greater destination?
Destination: is defined as the purpose for which one is destined. This can be any place you have in mind both physically here on earth, and of course the ultimate as formerly discussed, heaven. Either way, to reach your destination, you must embark on a journey.
THE JOURNEY: I’m sure if I told you, you could live life as you saw fit, doing whatever you wanted, when you wanted and the reward at the end was still the destination of heaven, the line at the gates would be infinite! Unfortunately for a lot of us, it doesn’t quite work that way. As in life, you must do the necessary things to get to your desired destination. For instance, if I am caught up in taking my wife to Bora Bora for vacation, I don’t just snap my fingers and we are there. It takes planning, finance, traveling by car, plane, maybe even boat, and whatever obstacles pop up along the way to reach our destination. We can’t just morph through all those things and pretend that part of the journey doesn’t exist. The journey toward heaven is more intricate, and I can’t walk you through anymore than to give you the path that I find myself on currently. To give you something I haven’t experienced is like the blind leading the blind. I can read to you what the Bible gives for you and I both to read. I can quote you the different ways ministers have interpreted the texts that we all have seen with our own eyes. No one has run this race to the end, gone to the destination and came back to tell me the blueprint, is the blueprint.
What I can offer you, is my journey. The one I am still on. One that, as I describe it, could have probably been a whole lot easier if I had done just a few things differently. But where I sit now, I have my eyes on the prize, the destination of heaven. The chance to see that beautiful place, a life beyond my imagination, a chance to see my loved ones again. The question I pose to myself, and then to you after hearing my journey and maybe reflecting on your own, is it about the journey? Or the destination?
MY JOURNEY: A year ago, I lay in a hospital bed not knowing if I was dead or alive. It was during these 10 days that I learned the root of my journey with God. 10 days to the outside world was a lifetime for me, literally. I laid there oblivious to my surroundings, but in my own realm, I was watching my whole life play out before me. From a little child to a full-blown adult. The good, the bad, the questionable, it felt like judgment day. During this whole time, so many different moving parts were going on, and it was hard for me to understand what I was going through at the time. I tried to explain to people afterwards and tried to put it all together myself to no avail. Here I am a year later, and I finally can settle myself and see what God was showing me. You see, one of the biggest things was I kept getting these series of tests, and 1 or more things would change, so I would keep coming up with different answers and constantly be wrong! No matter what I did, the answer was always the same! Or I’d get like these things to solve and no matter what I did, it would just keep starting over. The message to me was “I don’t know why you keep trying, you know the truth! If no one else knows the truth, you know the truth!” When I awoke, I took that message as I needed to find the truth! And exactly 1 year later, as I was thanking God on the anniversary of me going into the hospital, he spoke clarity to my mind. THE TRUTH is no matter how much I flip it, run from it, hide from it, curse it, the answer is and will always be God. He is that “zero multiplier”, when you put zero in that multiplication equation and expect to come up with any other answer!
Why me? Why do I know more than anyone? I heard the actor Terry Crews say, “Whatever God says about you and you repeat it, you sound very narcissistic; but whatever Satan says about you, and you repeat it, you sound very realistic.” From the time I knew there was a God, I knew I wanted to walk with God. I knew I was supposed to walk with God. God had already spoken over my life, more than once. But, I always felt like speaking on it, or even living on it, was boasting about it. To be special, to be chosen, was to “show off.” I sat on talents, sat on callings, and settled for more realistic things.
At 18, I had a plan. But at 46, God had a plan for me. our plans didn’t align. So my journey was to get to his plan from my plan and be everything I needed to be by the time I got there,
I still remember sitting down and staring at my senior memory book reading the questions over and over of where you see yourself in 5 years, 10 years. I wrote down lofty goals: playing in the NFL, an extraordinary salary, marriage, kids, Air Force Academy graduate, pilot’s license. Oh the perfect little life I had carved out for me, and it was all attainable! I flew out of Charleston, SC airport July 29, 1995 with a plan, my plan! By July 31, I was ready to revise my plans, but I fought the urges. I stayed for 6 months instead, and then left for home. As soon as I got home, I realized, I gave up on a huge part of my dream, my plan. I would no longer graduate from the Academy, no longer become a pilot, and now any dream of playing in the NFL had become very slim. I immediately became depressed. I made an uninformed decision based on emotion and in my opinion for years after, ruined my life. But you see, I failed in MY plan, but what I didn’t know is, I was beginning to succeed in God’s plan. That little 6 months in my life; 6 months that could have gone by so fast, actually went by so slow. It was then that I discovered my first real relationship with God. Far away from home and anyone I knew. No way to just pick up the phone and call anyone. The only trusted friend I had was the one friend I knew, God. Probably the most important lesson I learned along my whole journey, was the first lesson taught to me. I had to learn where my anchor was. I had to set the origin so I’d always know where to come back to. (0,0).
Although my plans seemed a little harder to reach, I didn't fully give up on them right away. I fought for them, and gave it another chance. I went to college again, tried football again. Football didn’t work out, and for a while that was a hard thing to swallow. I kept getting injured, kept trying to come back, and eventually realized it just wasn’t in the plans for me. It broke my heart. But, it opened up my schedule to things I would have never done had I been playing football. Let me show you how God works in the smallest details, and you may miss it if you’re not paying attention. I had all this new free time, so someone asked me to be a Resident Assistant, and I immediately got promoted to an Assistant Director of an apartment building. A month into that position, the Director was fired, and I spent the rest of the summer as the Director of the Apartment Complex. During this time, I would set up events for my residents, and allow them to host events also. One of the girls in my complex would always challenge me about the Bible, mainly because she thought I was the biggest heathen on campus, and she wanted to change my life. So, ofcourse, me being me, I welcomed the challenge without ever telling her my father was a minister and I grew up in the church. Long story short, she invited me to a revival her church had going on, and thought I would not come. I wasn’t planning on going, but I went anyway. As soon as I walked in the door, I could feel something come over me. I felt “different” So as the pastor was speaking and introducing the visiting Pastor giving the sermon at the revival, he picked me out and asked me my name. He said God told him I should come up and sing a song. Now no one in the state of Tennessee, where I was at the time, had ever heard me even attempt to sing a song, and it definitely wasn’t something I would volunteer to do. But like I said, something came over me as soon as I walked in the church. So I got up, very nervous, but obedient, introduced myself and said a few words, and then sang “He was there all the time”. At that moment, I felt like I was where I was supposed to be. It scared me! But it felt real! I had never felt as close to God as I felt right then! So, I ran. I would sparingly go back to church afterwards. Because no matter the church I would visit after, the Pastor, or a member, or someone would shake my hand and say something along the lines of “I see God all over you” or “God has something for you to do” I battled internally with God, for years. Yet, God was slowly moving me along towards his plan without my knowledge. While college football had become a thing of the past, I was recruited to play for the college flag football team that traveled and competed under the school’s name and sponsorship, as the quarterback. We won the Tennessee State Title twice with me as quarterback and was the National Champ runner-up one year. The success we had as a team meant a lot, but it’s the people God put in my life that I would have never met had I been on MY plan, that groomed me for God’s plan. Quick fast forward, my very first coaching opportunity was given to me by one of my teammates on this team. 3 of my closest friends to date are from this team. My oldest son plays on a 7 v 7 travel team with 4 other teammates' sons. A team we started together. The job I have now, was set up through networking based on a mutual friend. That mutual friend, the same friend that recruited me to play on the college flag football team over 20 years ago. When I opened my eyes in the hospital almost a year ago, one of the first faces I saw was a teammate from this very team. You see, while God is changing your plans, you may not understand it, but he is already making moves for you on his plan!
Key in for me on the part where I said “be everything I needed to be by the time I got there”. That part. That part is so important, because for me, it answers the question, why? How many times do you want to look back, or even while you’re going through something, wonder “why”? Well I’m here to tell you that the answer comes to you sometimes later, years later, even decades later! At 18, I could have become a minister, a mentor, a coach. I could have become a community organizer, a public speaker, an advocate for the poor and homeless. I could have sponsored events to bring communities out. I could have done everything I am doing right now, and more…BUT! It would have just been something for me to do. I had to survive on my own to know what it was like to succeed and to fail by myself. Failure showed me poverty. Failure showed me the doorsteps of homelessness. Failure showed me the importance of having a community behind you and organizations that can help you. Most of all, failure taught me resiliency and put a huge chip on my shoulder. I couldn’t understand how I could make so many meteoric rises in anything I tried, and then seem to fall so violently. It felt at the time like succeeding just wasn’t in the cards for me. I wish, right here I could say I stared things down like I was Job of the Bible, but I wasn’t. I was ready to give up, at any moment. But, it’s always good when you have praying people in your corner. Because even when I stopped praying, my parents and others kept going to God for me.
Then the path to my journey became clear, the fog slowly started to fade away, and I could see things clearly. God brought me through two traumatizing events, and when I came out, it was as if everything about me was new. The journey made sense now. You see, all those things I got to experience and then were taken away, had a purpose. I got to experience them, because I deserved the experience. You would be surprised at the different things I know how to do and can work with because of what I have succeeded doing. But also, God didn’t allow me to fall in love with it, because that wasn’t his plan for me. I can walk into any room and be a part of almost any conversation based on my experiences, but I’m also unique because God has a different direction for who he wants me to be. I had to experience loss; loss of loved ones, health, possessions, friends, in order to relate and show compassion to others I need to speak to or may hear my voice. I had to have a testimony to tell, and when I tell it, you can hear the truth and passion in my voice. Because it’s real! God gave me a story, a miracle to share, not just one, but two, to spread the word of my personal story of what he is capable of! I KNOW WHAT GOD CAN DO!
Yes at 18, I could have done everything I am doing right now. The earthly destination could be the same. But, to get to the heavenly destination, I had to get to the earthly destination as imperfect as God intended me to be. In conclusion, the journey to your earthly purpose or destination is what it's all about, because if you live through that journey...the journey that takes you from your plan to God’s plan, you won’t have to imagine the destination that follows. You will find your name on a mailbox, to one of those mansions, along that river, down that golden street, through those pearly gates, waiting for you, as my father would say, where the wicked cease from troubling and our weary souls can be at rest…heaven. “Don’t Crown him til I get there!”
Comentários