So I’ve decided to start blogging again and this is my first real post on my new blog.
This evening my family went on a bike ride down the Cherry Creek Bike Trail near our house, and it brought back so many memories that I thought I had forgotten. When I was little, that creek was my lifeblood, and I and my friends used to spend hours playing along its shores–exploring the wilderness among the cottonwood groves, building log bridges and stick forts, climbing on beaver dams, and wading in the stream. Every year our home school group would have a bike ride down the trail, which I remember as a major highlight of my year. Since I’ve been away at college it’s been several years since I’ve gone down that trail, and it was amazing how much has changed in that short time. New housing developments have sprung up in once empty fields covered in wildflowers, and new bridges and roads have been built where before there were none.
Yet enough remained the same to stir memories of a simpler time–an age when all the world seemed magical and I could be entertained for hours playing in the sand by the river, when a patch of woods barely a square mile in size felt deeply mysterious and I could find adventure simply by walking out my own back gate. It’s a sad fact of life that as you grow older, things lose the same magical appeal they had when you were young. Where once I could feel the magic of my own back yard, now I have to journey to a foreign country, climb a high mountain, or ski down steep slopes to feel the same sense of adventure. It is also why I do parkour, since vaulting railings, scaling walls, and climbing forbidden rooftops in a way restores some of that childlike wonder in the ordinary and mundane I used to feel long ago.
I once heard a sermon where the pastor said all feelings of nostalgia are at heart longings for heaven, and I can’t help but feel that must be part of what heaven is like–a return to the innocence and wonder of childhood where everything in the new earth seems wonderful and life is unclouded by “adult” troubles of lust or hatred, war, poverty, social evils, or corrupt governments. Heaven is a place where no matter how many times you’ve seen the same thing before, it always seems new and enchanting, and a sense of adventure awaits around every corner. And places like our little creek exist as but a small foretaste of that wondrous place.
The Prelator 