Every morning that I am able, I walk.  My walk takes me through 5 miles of beautiful country.  There are green hills, small lakes, creeks, crepe myrtle trees, birds, turtles.   You get the picture!  Anyway, as I walk I like to pray and I usually start with the Lord’s prayer.  But today when I said Thy kingdom come I thought….in order for God’s kingdom to come, this current kingdom has to pass away. Is that what I really want?  As I looked around I thought how difficult it is to let go of things I love.   I tend to be the sappy and sentimental type.  I like to stay where  memories have been made.  But then I remembered something that CS Lewis said  “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

If you think about it, even the most beautiful place in this world is still going to have rain, rust, broken limbs, wilting flowers.  This is not paradise  As it says in the second chapter of first Corinthians, “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has  prepared for those who love him”  This is my home now.  This earth.  I love it  I want to explore it.  I want to protect it.   But I must not get too attached.  I am passing through as an alien whose citizenship is in another country.  I will keep walking and enjoying the beauty that God has made.  But I will try and remember that it is just a foretaste of what it to come  There is a new earth…a better earth coming.  Thy kingdom come!