It’s however you want it to be, you just have to go where it is. Snow for skiing? Go to the snowy region. Water skiing? Choose that area instead. Heaven is a big, big place – there’s plenty of room for weather locales.

Weather in heaven doesn’t depend on planet angle, rotation and orbit around the sun. There are no seasons such as here on earth. Instead there are areas designed for cold, for warmth, for every “seasonal” variation human beings could desire. From snorkeling to mountain climbing, trekking across sand dunes to deep sea exploration, there is a region for that.

Why? I wondered. Why even have such locations for winter-like cold or summer heat, spring or fall-like “seasons” (for want of a better word)?

Why have mountains or oceans? Wilderness or rain forests? For all those exist there… Images passed through my mind of lakes and beaches, fishing streams and sand dunes, pine forests and lagoons. Too many pictures to count!

By then I was very curious indeed. Why design and create all this variety?

For our enjoyment. Rest. Recreation. Fellowship. Discovery. Education. Not to mention training. Exercise. Discipline. Teamwork.

We may learn of other reasons once we’re there, but love is the primary one. God loves us and it is His good pleasure to give us the kingdom, in its many facets, physical and spiritual.

It was an extraordinary answer to my ordinary question.

One night in May, 2008 I awoke in the wee hours of the morning worshiping God in my spirit – singing to Him about how wonderful He is, how magnificent, how merciful, how loving, exalting and praising him in poetry set to music.

I could see myself doing this, like watching a television set, as part of a group of worshipers in heaven. But it did not resemble any sort of worship service I’ve ever been a part of or seen in my life!

Some were up high in the room, in rows, some low, every space filled with exquisite movement and sound. You’d think some would crash into others, falling in tangles of arms and feet. But no-one did.

We were singing and dancing as we flew around in perfectly synchronized three-dimensional twirls and swirls and bows and leaps. In my mind’s eye I continued to watch all of this, yet also continued to worship and praise and magnify God myself. It was the most amazing experience.

I enjoyed and participated in this heavenly worship for some time, then fell sound asleep again. The next morning I remembered it all very clearly and wrote it down. I thought about it and prayed, wondering about what I had experienced.

“Remember Esther Williams and her troupe’s synchronized swimming routines in the movies?” the Lord reminded me. They were so graceful and lovely, those three-dimensional movements in the water that are not possible on land. That’s what it was like in that heavenly scene, except without water. Indeed, those graceful 3-D movements were in the atmosphere of heaven, where worshipers are not limited by earth’s gravity.

What an awesome experience this is to look forward to. And what an incredible gift this was, this glimpse of heaven’s worship from our awesome God who is so very worthy of our worship!

APOD from NASA 12 Feb 2011: Simeis 147: Supernova Remnant
Credit & Copyright: Nobuhiko Miki

It’s easy to get lost following the intricate filaments in this detailed mosaic image of faint supernova remnant Simeis 147.

Also cataloged as Sh2-240 and seen towards the constellation Taurus, it covers nearly 3 degrees (6 full moons) on the sky. That corresponds to a width of 150 light-years at the stellar debris cloud’s estimated distance of 3,000 light-years.

The remarkable composite includes image data taken through narrow-band filters to highlight emission from hydrogen and oxygen atoms tracing regions of shocked, glowing gas.

This supernova remnant has an estimated age of about 40,000 years – meaning light from the massive stellar explosion first reached Earth 40,000 years ago.

But this expanding remnant is not the only aftermath. The cosmic catastrophe also left behind a spinning neutron star or pulsar, all that remains of the original star’s core.

In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises
New York Times 27 Sept 2010

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.

Click on the link to read entire the article and associated media – fascinating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/arts/design/26masdar.html?_r=1&src=mv

Here’s a video aerial fly-through of the city:

Here’s a full-length video with voice narration:

Although serving in several roles, Joshua was primarily a soldier.  And more than a soldier, a warrior.

During their days in the desert in what today is Jordan, Joshua was training men for the battle ahead. He had to hand-pick the best, teach them how to fight and how to use their weapons. He was well aware that as soon as Israel crossed the Jordan River, they would be in enemy territory.

“About forty thousand armed for battle crossed over before the Lord to the plains of Jericho for war.” (Joshua 4:13 NIV) Joshua’s first major target was to be Jericho, a fiercely guarded walled city.

“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

“Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.” (Josh. 5:13-14 NIV) The Lord’s commander; captain of the Lord’s hosts, it says in the King James version.

He was there to give Joshua first an intelligence briefing, then his battle orders. (Those instructions may sound a little strange to us, marching around walls, but that’s what they were: battle orders.)

Who was he? An angel? Michael or one of his subordinates? Perhaps Jesus himself? We’re not told. But we are told that war, warriors and warfare were part of his mission on earth.

I was thinking about all this one evening and the fact that the scriptures describe another battle looming in Israel and probably other places in the middle east, in the not too distant future. Who will be trained well enough to fight and win in that war, I wondered? Most of the believers I know certainly aren’t.

The Lord began to answer that question by showing me an activity going on in heaven. Combat training. Arm to arm combat. Physical, mental, emotional – and spiritual – training. Weapons. Armor.

I thought at first I was dead wrong about what I saw. That simply could not be heaven, it had to be some sort of hallucination, a mistake. But it wasn’t. The Holy Spirit took me to several scriptures about the battles ahead, and explained in some detail what I was seeing.

Many believers will still be here on earth when that war needs to be fought. Untrained, ill-equipped believers who don’t know one end of a rifle from the other. They won’t know how to defend themselves, much less fight an enemy soldier. Like the children of Israel facing the Jordan River, most of them aren’t warriors.

But they aren’t called to be.

Out of a million or more, only forty thousand were called to be. They were chosen, trained, equipped and ready. And in the coming warfare, God’s warriors will be ready. They will be returning to earth with Jesus, fully trained and equipped. (See Revelation 17:14, 19:19)

Right now they are going through that training period.  I watched some of the training. I saw some of the weapons, both material and spiritual. I have never seen anything on earth exactly like them – not in any of those action and adventure and spy movies I’ve watched for years.

The Holy Spirit explained how some of them worked and how some are already working here on earth. Not technically weapons, some are designed to gather information, such as three-dimensional cameras that can see around solid objects. Invisibility cloaks for people and machines. I actually saw a news video about that one several months ago, being tested here on earth.

Not everyone in heaven is assigned to be trained as a fighter. Some are assigned to be designers of weapons, inventors or engineers or scientists. Or writers, composers, artists or musicians. But warriors will certainly be needed, and so some are chosen and taught how to be.

I am understanding more and more what heaven is like, and what it’s for. Worship. Work. And training for warfare.

I had been thinking about this planet being devastated, the mountains lowered, valleys raised, oceans evaporated, plant and animal life dead and rotted, even the elements melted. And wondering how long it would take to make parts of it habitable again, after Jesus brought us all back again. What a mess to clean up.

I Thessalonians 4:15-17 says those believers still alive when he returns will meet the resurrected dead ones in the sky. Some people believe we’ll all be in heaven for a while after that (7 years, or maybe 3-1/2 years), then be brought back with Jesus after he wins the last big battle with his enemies.

But I wonder about that – why bring the two divisions of Christians together in the air, one being the spirits of deceased believers coming down from heaven to reunite with their reconstructed physical remains, the other being the live believers going to heaven without having to die first?

It makes more sense to me if the two are meeting simply because Jesus is collecting the whole group to move us somewhere safe here on the planet earth. And after that, we’ll have a thousand years to learn how to manage the planet the right way, considering the lousy job human beings have done of that so far.

But those verses about heaven and earth passing away — and II Peter 3:10 about the very elements burning up — is that before or after the thousand years of peace? I haven’t made up my mind about the timetable.

In any case, I have thought all along, whenever I thought about it, that the new heaven (atmosphere, air) and new planet would be located right on top of the old ones. Archeologists often find cities built atop ruins of former cities, sometimes three or four cities deep as they dig. That’s the way I always thought, until the other day.

“Think New York,” he said. Hmmm.

New York was not constructed on top of the old, original York. It’s not even in the same continent. Likewise New Jersey. They are very distant, completely removed from the old country. They were built new, in a new country, on a new continent. A fresh start, just with reminiscent, memorial names.

New Earth. Different solar system? Different galaxy? A city called New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven, it says in Revelation 21, and settles on New Earth. City… or city-shaped ship…? Headquarters, moving from heaven onto New Earth.

Interesting to think about.

Bertha and Harold Motte with Betty and Harold Jr., Spring 1947.

I still miss him, but these days I picture him working on some piece of machinery, a motor or engine, but something far more high-tech than the Singer sewing machines he worked on at home and at Sears, or the airplane engines he worked on in WWII. He was in the Army Air Corps, before the Air Force was made a separate branch.

I can just see my daddy Harold and Tim’s daddy T.C. head to head, collaborating on something or other in a workshop in heaven. T.C. Cox also worked on airplane engines during the war, as a member of the National Guard or Reserves. That home service was mandatory in the war, not voluntary as it is today. They didn’t know each other here on earth, but somehow I’m sure they know each other now.

It has been sixty years now since daddy was transferred from earth to heaven but sometimes it seems like just the other day. I love you, daddy.

I didn’t really expect an answer.

Having read a great deal of science fiction growing up, and now reading about space scientists and astronomers discovering myriads of new galaxies they never suspected before, it seemed illogical to me and to many other people to suppose no other intelligent creatures existed anywhere.

And if they did, in whatever universe or dimension they call home, do they have religions, some version of right and wrong, conscience, awareness of sin or knowledge of God?

“Is that one question or many?” he responded. “Is that a serious question?”

Well, if we can actually discuss this, yes, it is a serious question, I said. If they exist, are some of them in heaven?

“Yes. Next question?”

In a phone conversation recently, my son commented that my descriptions of heaven are all from a physics-physical human viewpoint. Yes, up to now I have limited my descriptions here to the easily describable.

But I do understand why apostles John and Paul and prophet Ezekiel had such trouble describing what they saw and heard. Why some of those things were “unlawful” for them to share with others.

How do you describe a cloud room?

One of my follow-up questions had to do with whether it was possible to interact with non-human species in heaven who do not look, speak, understand, exist, operate, move, breathe — in other words, who do not function in any way, shape or form like human beings.

Angels good and bad are spirit beings who can appear in physical form. They can exist in our dimension, our galaxy, our universe. Sometimes they look like ordinary people. Sometimes they look like scary supernatural creatures, but interaction with them isn’t a problem for human beings.

But suppose an entity moved an inch a year when crossing a room? Or was composed of atoms so far apart that their arm was a thousand miles long and invisible to the human eye? Or their lifespan was a fraction of a second, in human time?

Suppose they had a crystalline structure and looked like a hunk of rock or grain of sand? Or had a plant-like form such as algae, or existed only in liquid or fire?

Suppose when they spoke, even if the language could be translated, the sound resembled the mere memory of an echo?

God didn’t say or show me what any of them looked like or operated like so I have no real idea. But he did tell me that the differences made ordinary interaction impossible, therefore he had created what I call a cloud room.

Now, it’s not an actual cloud or even a room; it’s an inter-dimensional area that somehow obliterates the differences between species and makes communication feasible. Cloud room is the closest I could come to describing that place.

It removes horror, and repugnance, and even morbid curiosity. It suspends the barriers of time and size and space in order that learning can occur. The only reason for its existence is discovery and education, innovation and invention.

He gave me a glimpse of this location, and all I can say is – it was like extremely nearsighted me looking at something or someone at a distance without my glasses. Nothing focuses. Everything’s blurry.

Not everything I have seen and heard of heaven can be described in purely physical, human terms. This is one example, and one reason why I don’t include some other things here. But I thought it was fascinating.

———————————–

* FYI – I’m not going to argue theological questions this question and answer is bound to raise with some.

The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 or simply M31, is captured in full in this new image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The mosaic covers an area equivalent to more than 100 full moons, or five degrees across the sky. WISE used all four of its infrared detectors to capture this picture (3.4- and 4.6-micron light is colored blue; 12-micron light is green; and 22-micron light is red). Blue highlights mature stars, while yellow and red show dust heated by newborn, massive stars.

Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, and is located 2.5 million light-years from our sun. It is close enough for telescopes to spy the details of its ringed arms of new stars and hazy blue backbone of older stars. Also seen in the mosaic are two satellite galaxies, known as M32, located just a bit above Andromeda to the left of center, and the fuzzy blue M110, located below the center of the great spiral arms. These satellites are the largest of several that are gravitationally bound to Andromeda.

The Andromeda galaxy is larger than our Milky Way and contains more stars, but the Milky Way is thought to perhaps have more mass due to its larger proportion of a mysterious substance called dark matter. Both galaxies belong to our so-called Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies, most of which are tiny dwarf systems. In its quest to map the whole sky, WISE will capture the entire Local Group.

This infrared image taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a star-forming cloud teeming with gas, dust and massive newborn stars. The inset reveals the very center of the cloud, a cluster of stars called NGC 3603. It was taken in visible light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

WISE, which is surveying the whole sky in infrared light, is particularly sensitive to the warm dust that permeates star-forming clouds like this one. In this way, WISE complements visible-light observations.

The mission also complements Hubble and other telescopes by showing the ‘big picture,” providing context for more detailed observations. For example, the WISE picture here is 2,500 times larger than the Hubble inset. While the Hubble view shows the details of the hot young star cluster, the WISE picture shows the effects that this stellar powerhouse has on its neighborhood.

The cluster contains some of the most massive stars known. Winds and radiation from the stars are evaporating and dispersing the cloud material from which they formed, warming the cold dust and gas surrounding the central nebula. This greenish “halo” of warm cloud material is seen best by WISE due to its large field of view and improved sensitivity over past all-sky infrared surveys.

These WISE observations provide circumstantial evidence that the massive stars in the center of the cluster triggered the formation of younger stars in the halo, which can be seen as red dots. The dust at the center of the cluster is very hot, producing copious amounts of infrared light, which results in the bright, yellow cores of the nebulosity.

Ultimately, this turbulent region will be blasted apart by supernova explosions. Other star-forming clouds in the Milky Way have experienced such eruptions, as evidenced by their pockmarked clouds of expanding cavities and bubbles.

Massive star clusters like this one are an important link to understanding the details of the violent original epoch of massive star formation in the early, distant universe. Astronomers also use them to study distant starbursts that occur when galaxies collide, lighting up tremendous firestorms of brilliant, but ephemeral, stars in the wreckage. Because NGC 3603 is so close, it is an excellent lab for the study of such faraway and momentous events.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The mission’s principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Image Addition Date: 2010-02-17

Death, i.e. the angel of death (played by Brad Pitt) is a bit bored doing the same thing day after day, collecting souls and escorting them to their next assigned habitat. He doesn’t decide where that is to be, mind you, he merely serves as an escort. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the movie:

Meet Joe Black is a 1998 romantic drama produced by Universal Studios and starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Claire Forlani, loosely based on the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday. The film is about media mogul Bill Parrish who becomes a guide to the angel of Death, who takes the form of a young man to learn about life on Earth and in the process, falls in love with Bill’s daughter Susan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Joe_Black

In the plot, Death becomes curious about this man Bill Parrish, wondering what his daily life on earth is like. After all, he never gets to see anything but the last few moments of anyone’s life.

Knowing the time is approaching for Bill’s demise, Death comes to Bill’s home and offers him a deal: make me welcome for as long as I like, and you can have extra time on earth. Just one thing – you can’t tell anyone who I really am. Bill agrees, and introduces him to the family as Joe Black. After all, Bill says, “If I tell them who you really are, I don’t think anyone will stay for dinner.”

Since he needed a human body to live in on earth, Death had selected a pleasant young man, nice looking, who was killed in an unfortunate accident – hit by a car while crossing the street.

“Coincidentally,” that young man had just met Susan Parrish, the daughter of his chosen research project, and Susan had been somewhat enchanted by him. An ensuing romance between Susan and Joe is intertwined into the story line – which complicates life, and death, for both of them.

One critic gave the movie a bad review. He assumed angels are “all knowing,” and since Joe Black didn’t act “all knowing,” it wasn’t a very good portrayal by Brad Pitt. I disagreed. God is all knowing, angels aren’t.

I thought Brad Pitt’s portrayal was very apt, more or less the way I would have written it. If an angel wants to investigate life as a human being on earth, it’s because he isn’t all knowing. He learns as he goes, about family, business, character – and love. Having fallen in love with Susan, at one point he determines to take Susan with them also, when it is time to take Bill Parrish. A horrified Bill persuades him not to do that.

At the end of the film when it’s time for Bill to die, he asks Joe, “Should I be afraid?” “Not a man like you,” Joe replies. They walk across a little bridge, out of sight and into eternity.

And then the other Joe Black – the young man killed in the car crash – walks back across the bridge to where Bill’s daughter Susan is standing, gazing toward the bridge.

Seeing Joe and her father walk away together, she had fully realized Joe’s true identity as the angel of Death. She knew Joe had to leave her, because it was time for her father to die.

But as a sign of his understanding, Death has not left her completely alone. The original “Joe” has been brought back to life for Susan, to get to know and perhaps fall in love with, as she had done with him.

It was a good ending.

A thought about Joe Black’s line, “Not a man like you.” A man gets into heaven, with or without an angel escort, only because of Jesus.

A born-again Bill Parrish is the sort of man who is truly busy in heaven, designing and building and accomplishing and enjoying every minute of it.

I liked this movie. I’ll probably watch it again.