I sit in a leather recliner next to the hospital bed that hospice delivered to the house. Out of my left ear I hear the hum and thump of the compressor for the oxygen machine and out of my right I hear the rattle of labored breathing. The bed is slightly reclined and my friend is mostly sleeping because they have increased his pain medication dosages substantially. But on occasion he mumbles something and lifts his hand and puts it on top of his head, as if he wants to scratch it or rub it or press on it with the palm of his hand. Maybe he feels pressure or pain from the tumor swelling or maybe at this point most of his actions are involuntary. I don’t know.

What I do know is that he is dying and probably only has a few days or weeks to live. A few years ago, after he was first diagnosed with a Glioblastoma Multiforme, a slow-growing executioner in his brain, we started meeting together for lunch on a semi-regular basis and we talked about our lives and families and the inevitable. Those were sincere conversations. Some of the most sincere I have ever had. And it was not just him doing the talking. I told him a lot about my struggles with finances and sin and how life was hard. Once, during an especially honest conversation about his marriage, he admitted to me that he had been a deeply sinful husband and father. He looked straight at me and he said, “I’ve only ever been good at two things, working with wood and playing the drums. Thats it.” He also expressed to me that in this process of losing everything and everyone that was most dear to him that he only had Jesus. That he could only cling to Jesus and that is all he had. I told him that even though it’s really really hard, that only having Jesus is a good place to be.

Ever since then, my imagination has wandered over and over again to this vision of my friend in the new heavens and the new earth. . . . . :

**************

Like he often does, a man walks through the gates of the the great city with a backpack slung over has shoulders and a large bottle of crystal clear water for drinking. He works his way through the bustle of redeemed ones like a man on a mission and follows the well-worn path over the verdant hills into the great forest beyond. He is looking for something. The perfect thing. He walks with strength and determination through the woods of trees that seem to him larger than the great skyscrapers of the city. He laughs to himself as he remembers that on the old earth they had buildings that they called skyscrapers which seemed so impressive at the time. But these trees are greater, bigger, more rooted, more REAL than even the greatest things he remembers from the old earth. The crunch of the fallen leaves under his feet echoes in his ears like music and provide rhythm to his strides.

After walking for hours through the forest, he comes upon a glade he has never seen before. He looks up. Although the sun is directly overhead, it seems dim compared to the Glory which shines down through the leaves and makes beautiful patterns of light and shadow on the edge of the glade. The sun seems more like it always was, a star, an especially bright one which you can see in midday, but still dimmed compared to the light coming from the holy mountain. He walks to the middle of the glade and sits down, then lays back and lets the light warm his body. He closes his eyes and falls deep asleep. He dreams. The Lord is with him in the glade and is pointing over to the eastern edge, maybe two hundred yards away. He is showing him. The thing he has been looking for. Its right there waiting for him.

He wakes up, invigorated and having been shown where to go, walks over to the eastern edge of the glade. There is a young maple tree, recently fallen, probably by the wind, but clearly this is God’s gift to him and he is thankful. He sits with his back up against the trunk of the fallen tree and takes his last swig of water. He takes out of his bag a small saw he made himself years ago and removes a larger branch from the fallen tree. He cuts all the smaller branches off and then heaves the larger end unto his shoulder and drags it behind him towards the great city. He delights, as he does every day, on the strength and vigor of his body, which seems every day to be renewed. Because of Yahwehs’s faithful provision, all that was broken about his life and body on the old earth, the tumor, the broken body and broken relationships, all seem like a very distance memory, kept alive just enough to remind him of the mercy, redeeming love and greatness of God, who in his creativity and providence makes all things new every day. Pain, hunger, thirst, weakness, chronic fatigue, melancholy, anxiety and finally, death, were all so long ago melted away by the shining Glory of God that the pain of it is all but forgotten and is replaced by the joy that comes from knowing the great Story that is spoken of every day in the great city.

He makes this trek to the glade every day and every day he returns to his home in the Great City carrying more wood from the fallen tree. Eventually, all of the wood is in his shop. The Lord has provided all the tools he could ever dream of to CREATE beauty from God’s faithful provision. And so he begins to work, every day curing the wood, forming and shaping it into pieces of just the right shape and thickness and slowly over the months and years he forms instruments of perfect form and function. He works in his shop, but he also travels to the markets of the great city as he procures and forms the metal rings and spends months looking for the just the right material for the drumheads. And patiently he works. He forms wonderful new relationships with other saints who were and are skilled in drum-making and who have labored to create new materials and creative processes for drum-making. Slowly, over years and decades, he creates his drumset. And every night, he plays.

He is visited often by his daughter who died of a heart defect at three months old and now she radiates like an angel as she sits in his shop and watches him work and play. They play together and talk often of her beautiful mother and her brothers and sisters who have yet to join them in the great city. He tells her often of something she never really understood or knew, about what life was like on the old earth. How it was at once filled with great pain and also great beauty that pointed the way to the Son. Often old friends and great musicians from the old earth come to his shop. They bring their instruments and together they play. They make music. Beautiful music about the creator and the creation, about love and loss and redemption, about the angels and the bright glory shining down from the mountain. But their favorite songs are the ones that tell the story of the Lamb. The story of how they were once lost, blind, weak, sad and in pain and how the Son came down to that old and broken earth and made things right at great loss and pain to himself. They sing of how even now He sits on the Holy mountain and bares the scars on his body that show what he had to do to make everything right. The angels marvel and cannot understand it. It is a mystery to them. But deeply and truly and from the depths of their souls, the redeemed ones understand and they rejoice with full hearts. Every time those songs are sung or played in that wood shop in the great city, the rhythm is true and sure, made on a perfect set of drums.