Last in a series on Eternity.

I love sunshine. Maybe I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, or maybe I just like the sun, but my mood is always lifted when the golden light breaks out after a dreary day. This Spring week in the South, we’ve had snow, sleet, sub-freezing temperatures, high winds, rain, and sunshine. Sunshine’s the best.

It makes me think of words the Holy Spirit inspired, and the apostle John recorded, about a place that never needs sunshine. It never has dark days or endless nights.

“And there shall no longer be any night; and they shall not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God shall illumine them; and they shall reign forever and ever.”  Rev. 22:5

Some of my favorite lesser-inspired authors have attempted to imagine heaven. Light that dazzles and draws is a recurrent theme.

Catherine Marshall, in Christy’s voice, describes her near-death encounter:

”Light was drawing me irresistibly, dazzling light, refulgent light of a quality I had had but hints of before. The light was up ahead, still in the distance. But even here it bathed the glen through which I was running in shimmering splendor. The grass was dotted with flowers . . . all of such intense coloration that they were not like flowers at all; they were explosions of color. I did not understand and longed to pause to examine the flowers more closely. But I could not stop for that now. The light – I must get to the light!

“Bathed in its luster, the leaves on the trees, the blossoms on the boughs, the blades of grass did not seem to be lighted from the outside. Rather the light appeared to come from inside of each object, from its heart, from its very nature, so that each leaf, each petal stood apart from all others, living dynamic forces somehow poised in motion, energy in balance.

“Something had been stripped from my eyes. I was seeing in a manner I had never seen before. Unbelievingly, my eyes fastened on the colors, the vivid pulsating colors, the riotous intensified colors, drinking them in, feasting on them. All of my life I had cherished color and light, but never had there been such colors or such light, never in all the world.” 

In “The Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis imagines bus passengers stopping in heaven:

“The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. . .It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. ” 

I’ll close with more words from the apostle John:

“And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.” I John 1:5

No. More. Darkness.