I began part one of this two-part series on new places with God by reading from

CS Lewis's book, The Horse and His Boy, and the beautiful enticing disruption of Aslan as he's walking alongside Shasta in the woods,

tell me your sorrows.

Well, I had another one last week, except this time was over the holidays, I just wanted some

big book to read that would keep me from doing projects, chores, work, especially email.

I was almost reading more for the purpose

of distracting myself from things I knew.

I just do work.

And so I picked up the full united volume of the Lord of the

Rings and I read the whole thing years and years ago but I actually hadn't read he sat down in like

chapter one page one in probably a decade so started reading through it anyway here's

the moment we're in Lothlorian and Tolkien is describing, you know, they've lost

Gandolf in the minds of Moria and Aragorn is now the leader and they found refuge in Lothlorian and now he's describing the tree houses that the

elves live in the fleets as he calls them and you've got to go up these ladders into these trees,

and then there's these enormous beautiful platforms, but they're dwellings, and there's lamps and

lanterns, and there's lights within and

lights without and there's music and that sort of thing and in the

playfulness of God it's just this moment where he goes, I told you so. Okay, what it was I told you so was a few

weeks prior to that I had said, Jesus, I really want to see your kingdom again. I want to see the

beautiful places of the kingdom of God. Like what's it going to look like when we're there? What's what is it like now? I mean it exists. I'm just not there yet, but exists and this other reality, this whole world.

And what I saw was this exquisite picture.

It was nighttime, and it was a forest.

...