Maps

I love maps.  I love the colour and shape of them, and the codes that make brown lines into mountains and black boxes into stations.  I love looking at the whole of an area laid out before me as if I was in space, as if it was my domain and I had secret information about every part of it.  I love the feeling of order they give me, and the excitement of understanding the land, and of seeing how everything relates together.  So a map is like a mystic, showing the interconnectedness and beauty of everything.  On google, you can zoom in and out of maps, like God zooming in to measure your mitochondria, and zooming out to hold universes.

Does God see our world like we see a map, knowing where everything is and how well it hangs together?  Are God’s maps 3D, or perhaps 4D with every point in space showing what happens through time?  Does God enjoy the funny names, the audacity of a steep slope, the greenness of forests, the random shape of coasts?  Are our names written on God’s map – ‘Jane lives here’, each one of us important enough to God to have a blue plaque on our house?  And perhaps it’s not just us, - ‘magnificent oak tree lives here’, ‘busy beetle lives there’. 

Do God’s maps line the halls of heaven to show off the beauty of what God has made, the complexity of land and sea?  Does God’s heart warm when looking at the parts we’ve made, even if not perfect, like the pictures parents put proudly on walls?  We have different maps to show different things – natural features, or distribution of religions, or areas at war, but God would see them all at once, the lovely and the horrific, the light and dark, without each one losing its own taste.  God can hold horror without ever losing the stillness of peace, or the possibility of love.  God’s maps always have heaven at the heart.