There it stood. A small, brown rectangle rising out of the tall grass prairie just east of Fort Larned.
It probably was no more than 30 feet long by 12 foot wide. It had sod walls, a thatch and sod roof, dirt floors, a couple of rough wood doors, two windows with glass, a straw-mattress bed in one corner and a small cast iron stove in the other. And it smelled like dirt. It was hardly a home by today’s standards.
Yet on one clear, mid1800s Kansas morning as one last window was set and one last door was hung, it must have been the most beautiful site in a settler’s families eyes. It was home. It was hope. It was all that they could wish for because it was the start of a new opportunity, a new life.
And we stood in amazement. The contrast too stark. The entire home was no larger than one room of the basement I am finishing at our Kansas home. There are three more rooms in our basement and two more floors above that. And our home is considered middle class, a starter home to some.
We couldn’t help but wonder if we could have asked that pioneer family to describe heaven, what they would have said. How close their description would have been to Kansas today. Paved roads. Beautiful homes. Tree lined streets. Food you didn’t have to grow. A place that is never dark. Bathrooms that didn’t require a trip into the bitter winter cold!
But as we turned away from the sod house, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps we had experienced a profound irony. That perhaps that simple sod house on the windswept prairie might, in fact, have better resembled heaven more than our life today. For heaven is not about things. It is not about more of what we have today. It’s about less. About a life “eye hath not seen nor ear heard,” imagined, comprehended or begun to understand.
I can only envision on a distant day at a museum in heaven, a family standing before my home. The contrast too stark. Asking the question, “Do you think they ever realized how little how much they had really was?”
Lord, come quickly. Save us from our fixation on worldly things. Amaze us with the Kansas you have in mind for the earth made new.