Monday, May 12, 2025

This is the forty-first installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Alright, it’s time to cover something that I think is a lot of fun to ponder, and you might too. If you’ve been reading any of my stuff for a while, you probably noticed that I’m very much into nature, plants, agriculture, and the like. I have an entire world based on punny plant-animal fusions, and another where the entire culture revolves around the cycle of the Seasons. To me, the rhythm and cadence of the world changing every year is very important.

But it’s only one part of our existence. As Christians, we live knowing that there will be another existence after this one, and there’s much debate about what it will be like. As curious and creative creatures, I think we can’t help but wonder about things that are promised but not elaborated upon.

Many popular visions abound of heaven as eternal luxury, sitting around on clouds strumming harps, or of eternal abundance, having every material good you’ve ever wanted on earth and living like a kid in a candy store. But I don’t think that’s really what it will be at all.

I argue that heaven is going to be just like this world in the underlying mechanics; physics, chemistry, biology, everything. Why? Because Jesus had a snack with the apostles. From Luke 24 (NABRE):

Jesus did this to prove to the apostles that he wasn’t a ghost, but a real, living person. But it also shows us something else very important: the fact that he could eat in the first place proves that we will be able to eat in heaven. Since we will be able to eat, there must be something for us to eat. That means there must be either plants or animals, but probably both, since an ecosystem can’t support just one or the other. Animals need plants to eat, and plants need animals to eat them, otherwise they grow out of control. There then need to be predatory animals to eat the plant-eating animals, and so on.

And if there are plants, that means there must be a cycle of night and day. Plants grow by absorbing sunlight and other materials during the day, and then actually building their structures and cells overnight. If you’ve ever looked out at your yard and seen flowers or weeds “spring up overnight,” that’s completely accurate.

If there’s a night and a day, that means we must have to sleep at some point. Though our bodies may be perfected and we can walk around with nail wounds and pass through walls like Jesus did, our minds will still need periods of rest and recuperation. We can’t spend 10,000 years straight doing anything without some down time in the middle.

And this post is getting to be too long, so it will continue on Wednesday. Like I said, fun things are happening!