Get Your Head in the Clouds

"Pursue the things over which Christ presides... Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ — that's where the action is. See things from His perspective." — Colossians 3:1-2, Message

We never have to worry that becoming a person who seeks things and sets our minds on things that are Above rather than focusing on the things and issues of this world will somehow render us, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” In fact, in the upside-down economy of the Kingdom of God, it's good to know that the very opposite is reality…

Jesus, when He was ready and willing to heal a deaf and dumb man, first looked up to heaven “and said, ‘Ephphata,’ which means, ‘Be opened!’ Instantly, the man could hear perfectly, and his tongue was freed so he could speak plainly!”—Mark 7:33-35

Jesus, when He was ready and willing to speak life into his dead friend Lazarus, and as a foreshadowing of His own destiny (and ours), “looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, thank You for hearing me.’”—John 11:39-44

Jesus, when He was ready and willing to obey the ultimate calling on His life simply out of a Love relationship with the Father, “looked up to heaven and said, "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so he can give glory back to you.”—John 17:1-5

The next time someone—especially the accuser's voice in your own head—tells you to “get your head out of the clouds,” put it right back in. Because, as Jesus modeled, it is Above where perfect power, goodness, friendship, and life have their headquarters, and when we fix our hopes there and get our perspective from there rather than the tangled mess that's right in front of us, all things are possible.

Becoming heavenly minded has nothing to do with covering our ears and looking the other way but is instead all about knowing and activating what it really means to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” into the people and situations of our lives, and to simply be ready and willing, knowing that the One who has gone before us will be coming back soon and is cheering us on until that day:
 

"You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you and I have appointed you—I have planted you—that you might go and bear fruit and keep on bearing, and that your fruit may be lasting, that it may remain, abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in My Name as presenting all that I Am, He may give it to you." (John 15:16)

  

“We can do nothing else but watch and wait, which means enthusiastically, totally taken up, deaf toward everyone and [and everything] who would make us confused with doubts, blind to every fore that comes between us and that future of [and with] God. Only one thing is of importance to us: We want to see God; we want to hear God; we want to receive God; we want to know God; we want to serve God. We want inconceivably nothing else, in any case, nothing like we want God"—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

[photo:vagabondish.com]

The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/710926

The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/710926