The physical Universe in all its vastness was before me. I saw it as if outside it looking in, and it was incomprehensibly big.
There are no words for the scales of size and distance involved, and yet at the same time, it looked like a little thing from my perspective. Weird and glorious all at once.
"What would you like to see?" he asked me.
"Everything," I said.
"That would take forever," he answered, and smiled, "even in its current imperfect state."
That was the point of the Universe, I knew - a playground of materiality for God's children; a place of infinite variety, complexity and beauty - all for us.
It was easy to lose sight of that fact on-planet. From the surface looking out, our beautiful, but broken, Blue Marble seemed small and insignificant in comparison to the immense celestial sea in which it floated. But what does comparative size have to do with importance. Our world is like the egg of the Universe. It is the place from which redeemed life will reach out and populate the sky. That was His plan from the beginning.
"Our Father is extravagant in His preparations for Eternity," my companion told me. "You have no idea how much He values us or what He has in store for His children. He made all of this with us in mind, so that He could delight in our delight."
"There are no words," I said marveling at the magnificence before me.
"Precisely," he agreed.
"It's easy to imagine we don't mean much of anything, but we really mean everything, don't we?" I asked.
He nodded.
I understood then that we had lost the assurance of our importance at the Fall of Man, and have been trying to get it back ever since - looking everywhere and believing just about anything except the truth. Not because He hid it from us, but because we rejected Him and therefore would not see.
It all made a kind of tragic sense, like a rebellious child refusing to believe in a parent's love because doing so would obliterate the child's illusion of being the center of his own existence. Returning that love would entail an acknowledgement that the child was not what he thought he wanted to be - his own god. Rebellion against God is the ultimate selfishness; the pinnacle of willful blindness.
"The Father wants each of us to have all this, but we can't without being in Him - the very source of Life itself. Unless we abide in Him, we can have no life. It's simple, actually," he said. "Even a child can understand it."
"Especially a child," I agreed.
A moment more of taking in what was before me brought something else to my understanding: if this gift of everything was made just for us, what must it say about the Maker and Giver?
"Exactly," he replied, reading my thoughts. "If it would take forever to explore and come to know Creation, how immeasurably more satisfying will it be to come to know the Creator as He truly is in Himself?"
In essence by being presented with the entire Universe, I was perceiving merely His footprint in the sands of time and space - the signpost pointing to the true destination: Him.
And in my mind, or perhaps echoing across all Creation itself, I heard that Voice say yet again what it all meant.
“AND THIS IS ETERNAL LIFE, THAT THEY MAY KNOW YOU, THE ONLY TRUE GOD, AND JESUS CHRIST WHOM YOU HAVE SENT."
"There is one more gift," my companion said.
