01 May A glimpse of heaven, from Iceland’s Dyrhólaey lighthouse

Mine and Carissa’s days here in Iceland are long and beautiful, with the light starting aound 6am and staying light until 11pm we have ample time to sit quietly, allowing our souls to be restored in Iceland, one of Gods most beautiful creations.

For months I have been looking forward to adding Iceland’s Dyrhólaey lighthouse to my lighthouse memories. Perched high up on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic ocean, one can stand looking southward across the Atlantic, aware that there is no land, nothing but a vast body of water that lies ahead of them all the way to the south pole. In 1991, the US journal Islands Magazine counted this beach as one of the ten most beautiful beaches on Earth. Its stretch of black basalt sand is one of the wettest places in Iceland. The cliffs west of the beach are home to many seabirds, most notably puffins which burrow into the shallow soils during the nesting season. Offshore lie stacks of basalt rock, remnants of a once more extensive cliffline Reynisfjall, now battered by the sea.

I will always remember our time spent in this heavenly sanctuary that God spoke into existence, a place where we can witness some of his most beautiful handiwork, allowing ourselves to become completely lost in the vastness of his creation, reflecting on his endless love for us and his relentless pursuit for hour hearts. Sitting here at length with the cold wind heightening our senses, I have never seen a beach so black, the sky so blue nor the mountain peaks in the distance so white. This is truly a glimpse of heaven.

“Our Longing for Eden
We are homesick for Eden. We’re nostalgic for what is implanted in our hearts. It’s built into us, perhaps even at a genetic level. We long for what the first man and woman once enjoyed—a perfect and beautiful Earth with free and untainted relationships with God, each other, animals, and our environment. Every attempt at human progress has been an attempt to overcome what was lost in the Fall.

John Eldredge, in The Journey of Desire, tells a parable of a sea lion who had lost the sea and lived in a desert where it was dry and dusty. But something inside him longed for what he’d been “made for: “How the sea lion came to the barren lands, no one could remember. It all seemed so very long ago. So long, in fact, it appeared as though he had always been there. Not that he belonged in such an arid place. How could that be? He was, after all, a sea lion. But as you know, once you have lived so long in a certain spot, no matter how odd, you come to think of it as home.

Our ancestors came from Eden. We are headed toward a New Earth. Meanwhile, we live out our lives on a sin-corrupted Earth, between Eden and the New Earth, but we must never forget that this is not our natural state. Sin and death and suffering and war and poverty are not natural—they are the devastating results of our rebellion against God.

We long for a return to Paradise—a perfect world, without the corruption of sin, where God walks with us and talks with us in the cool of the day. Because we’re human beings, we desire something tangible and physical, something that will not fade away. And that is exactly what God promises us…”

Excerpt From: Randy Alcorn. “Heaven.”