I walked into the bathroom stall. Suddenly, my brain was in a whirl. I was in Mexico again. There sitting next to the toilet was a trashcan. I can see you right now, scratching your head going, “a trashcan?” That’s important enough to write about? You may not have noticed but in public American bathrooms, there is more often then not a little tiny trash can on the wall of the stall, not a normal sized one sitting on the floor next to the toilet. In Mexico the opposite is true. At least, all the bathrooms I was in had normal sized trashcans. You see, in Mexico the plumbing is not good enough for you to flush toilet paper down the toilets so it gets thrown away. And thus suddenly, I did not know which country I was in. My brain knew that I had just arrived at this restaurant that is only in Wisconsin with my brother, who has never been to Mexico, but my brain said, “This does not look like America, you are back in Mexico.” Of course this situation got resolved quickly as the side of my brain that said I was in Wisconsin overruled the other side of my brain, but it got me thinking.
You see, in the weeks following my trip to Mexico, I often had things that took me back to those wonderful days. None of them gave me the location crisis that the above story did but combined they made me wonder if you were really in tune with God and sought Him above all else would it be possible to not be sure if you were in heaven or on earth at a particular moment?
Could you get to a point where you did not know if you were in his presence on this earth or somehow were in his presence somewhere else? To get to this point would take a serious relationship with God and a lot of time truly spent in His presence but it would be pretty amazing. I think perhaps we should be longing for a day when we lose sense of our location because we know God that well. We should desire to be in God’s presences so much that things throw us off balance. We should be waiting for Christ to return so anxiously, that during the waiting we get familiar enough with the land to which He will take us that we start seeing it on earth.
Is this possible? I don’t know. But I liked the sense of having a location crisis and I would like it even more if the crisis was between a place on earth and a place with God.