Our world can seem upside down and out of alignment much of the time. It leaves us longing for something more, different and better even on some of our best days. We hear talk about heaven but despite our best efforts to imagine it from what scripture may tell us, we fall short of any clear sense of it.

Elyse Fitzpatrick in Home: How Heaven and the New Earth Satisfy Our Deepest Longings describes our dilemma this way: “…how could I possibly tell you about something as simple as an orange if you had never tasted one? How could I tell a color-blind person about the sea in the Virgin Islands…or try to describe what it will be like when we have more than just the three types of color receptors our eyes presently have…or that we’ll have unlimited strength and a new body that is perhaps as changed as an acorn is when it grows into a seventy-five-foot oak?”

Nonetheless, we wonder and are curious what life and our surroundings will be like in eternity when we are on the new earth. Elyse Fitzpatrick longs to know what that will be like and takes the reader on a twelve-chapter journey to make us thirst for that place and life as we may never have before. Doing so can help us live our life now and here while keeping the there in view and remind us that our discontent in this life can only be answered when we truly are “home”.

The author had not planned to write a book on this topic but had become aware of a longing within her she could not nail down except to describe it as “homesickness.”  Her description of the feeling was as follows:

     “I felt it all the time, even when I was happy. It wasn’t just sorrow. It was a longing: a pining for a better place and time…no, a perfect place and time; a different reality. It felt like longing for home, but not for a  home I had ever been to.”

This longing led Elyse Fitzpatrick on searches through scripture, words of theologians, and other research sources to try to tease out more about what life in the other reality awaiting us after death might be like. What she discovered was a powerful view of what we can look forward to including a reminder of the garden pictured in Revelation and how earth before it was corrupted by the fall of man and sin began in a beautiful garden. She noted that gardens are found throughout scripture.

“So what will our new home be like? In order to answer that question, let’s think about what the original garden was like. It was, after all, the place we were created to live, and we are headed back there once again. God isn’t finished with his garden world. In fact, he’s blasted open the doors and emblazoned a banner that reads, Welcome home, sons and daughters! on the gates.”

Elyse Fitzpatrick

There will be no more bucket lists as Elyse describes the new earth. The vast mountain ranges, deep seas, and colors beyond what we can envision will all be waiting for us to explore.  In addition to our worship, many of the gifts already designed uniquely in each of us will be used in this new earth. And guess what? We’ll never run out of time for conversations with people from ages past and all over the world and delighting in this place untouched by sin and clouded with pain and sorrow will be something we never tire of.

If you wonder about what’s next after life on this earth, Elyse Fitzpatrick’s book will give you new glimpses to consider.