Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. You could write for Meditate, too! Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor.
New arrivals to heaven relaying an idea found in Swedenborg’s writings: “Every single thing that exists on earth exists in an infinitely more perfect form in the heavens… After death, we are perfectly human. In fact, we are more perfectly human than we were before in the physical world...”
One of the new arrivals, a politician: “I cannot actually tell any difference between my being alive then and my being alive now, except that my reasoning is now sounder. When I have reflected on what I used to think, a number of times I have felt ashamed of myself” (True Christianity 693).
This meditation helped me in the circumstances I’m in right now. My one-year-old son is sick and I feel a lot is being asked of me. Well, not a lot, but one big thing: not to put myself first, but instead put my children and my husband first, and handle it gracefully, that is, with Grace, without turning the experience into resentment and reason for blame—which I did just this morning.
I find comfort in the truth in these passages that my thoughts and ideas here in this world are often misguided and that events that happen in the world or in heaven are not to be feared. The Lord is here with me, in me and in them, “for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). The Lord never abandons us. The Lord will never abandon me, no matter how terrifying I find my current circumstances. The actual movement of life can be trusted, has love in it and power, even though it means going through states where I feel overwhelmed by my own attachment to negativity.
The fear these negative states bring me into is a fear of “what could be,” imagining that it’s ever possible to have something happen outside of the Lord’s providence, outside of the Lord’s care. In truth, nothing ever can happen this way; that’s the covenant, the rainbow after the flood. It is a thought not rooted in truth that somehow life could happen in such a way that wouldn’t be in keeping with the Lord’s everlasting covenant.
I can resonate with the politician’s sense of humiliation about what he used to think while in the world. I’m grateful that in this life now, through meditating on the Word I can come into some humiliating awareness of how misguided this fearful train of thought is. Seeing it for what it is in contrast with a heart-felt recognition of the truth makes it easier to let it go, have compassion for myself, and feel empowered to live according to the truth in my relationships.
Chelsea is wife to a PhD candidate. In addition to mothering her two young children round the clock, she is an assistant editor for New Church Connection and an editor and writer for New Church Perspective.