the ant

I could hear the wind against the side of the house as the late December night pressed cold Minnesota fingers onto the windows. The bedtime story was over and I sighed as I clicked off the lamp, leaving the wall tenderly bathed in the glow of a nightlight. A gust rattled the glass as I gazed out on the moonlit yard below this cozy room. The girl snuggled further under the blankets as I brushed aside her silky hair and planted a kiss on her cheek. The simplicity of this young life suddenly called to me and I longed to snuggle under covers and dream even as I knew I must return to the illuminated rooms of the main floor and embrace tasks that would take me long into the cold night.

"Dad— I have just one question."

These were famous words from a curious daughter always longing to extend "good night" into a lingering conversation. Instead of preempting further words with music from her compact disc player and slipping into the dark hall, something gave me patience.

"What's that, sweetheart?" I sat on the edge of the bed, her silhouette faint upon the pillow.

"Where is heaven?"

Her words hung in the air like breath on a still winter night. As if interested in the question, the gale outside paused for a moment allowing the words to hang there.

"Maybe heaven is all around us—maybe right here" I replied after a moment. The girl had heard many stories of heaven, and her imagination had been taught to accept that wondrous places exist beyond our immediate world. It was time for her to seek such places.

"What do you mean—how can heaven be here?" she replied quietly.

"Sweetheart, there may be many places and times that we can't understand because we have been made to know only about the three dimensions of our world and about time running one way. God isn't limited to this space and this time. Math tells us there could be other kinds of space besides what we know, and that other space could be right here with us."

"Right here with us…" her voice trailed off as she repeated the words. "So God would see both kinds of space at the same time, even though we can only see one?"

"Maybe. I sometimes think that God doesn't even live in time like we do" I said. "He can choose to enter time, like when he shared himself with us as Jesus, but I think he knew the whole story of our universe before he even began it. To him, maybe yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all today."

"Or all yesterday…" she added, quietly.

"That's right, sweetheart. I think that's why God tells us that his special name is just 'I AM.' It makes me feel good to think that God knew everything about this universe and how it would turn out before he chose to make it. That means it must have a really happy ending."

"But what about all the bad things that happen—how can there still be a happy ending?"

"Somehow. I think he built our universe to tell a story that is too beautiful not to tell. Only we can't really see much of the story from this world, so we don't understand how beautiful it is, and how beautiful it will be. And we don't know much about heaven."

The wind hissed along the wall and the girl pulled the covers closer to her.

"How can bad things be part of something beautiful?"

"I don't know, but I have ideas." I rose and walked over to the window. I could just make out the small trees tossed and swaying in the wind of the yard below. "Do you remember that huge map we walked across last summer in Oslo?" I asked, referring to a vast world map display we had visited during a family trip to Norway.

"The map of the whole world that we could stand on?"

"Yes, that one. Do you remember that it was so big it took awhile to walk all the way across the world? Do you remember how each country was marked and how the oceans and land were different colors?"

"I remember."

"Think what it would be like to be a tiny bug walking across that huge flat map of the earth."

"You mean like an ant?"

"Yes. Imagine being an ant walking across that huge flat map. What would it seem like?" I asked. I could see her sit up slowly in the bed.

"All the ant would be able to see is that the colors sometimes change, but it wouldn't understand the map. It might not know where it was."

"Do you think it would even understand that it was walking on a map?"

"No." She sat silently.

"As the ant walked across the huge map, all it would understand is that the colors sometimes change. It wouldn't know much else."

"Maybe the colors would seem happy or sad for the ant." she said.

That insight caught me completely by surprise.

"Exactly. Just like we have happy and sad days, and the things of this world look like a mixture of happy and sad."

"So we're like the ant, and the good and bad things and happy and sad things might be like colors that make a picture too big for us to see." She looked past me out the window. "But do you think it's a picture God can see?" she added after a moment.

"I think it's even more amazing than that." I said softly, and sat next to her, holding her small hand. "If the ant couldn't even understand that it was walking across a beautiful, colorful map of the world, it could never even try to understand that the flat map was actually just a picture of something real that is much bigger and more beautiful."

"Our whole world…"

"Yes."

"And we're like the ant."

"Yes."

I kissed her gently and as she lay her head onto the pillow, I could barely see her smile.

"Thank you for talking to me, Dad."

"I love you" I replied. As I turned, I could swear that I heard my words echoed in the wild wind outside.


12.29.02