

FCFI
January 19, 2025
If my memory serves me correctly, my earliest recollection as a child was when I was just under three years old and my mom and dad brought my baby brother home from the hospital after he was born. Another brother and I were staying at our aunt’s house. We were playing outside that day when we saw dad coming up the driveway in our family station wagon. As he got closer, I saw mom in the passenger seat. Dad pulled up and stopped and there was mom holding this little blond baby in her arms all wrapped up tight in blankets. She was so proud.
Another memory was when I was 4 or 5 years old, one of my brothers and I were out playing in the barn. We wanted to play in the haymow so I sent him up the ladder first and I followed. Halfway to the top, the pitchfork he was lugging along slipped from his hand and when it fell the tines went right through the meaty part of my upper arm. We studiously put the pitch fork back where it belonged and ran to the house to tell mom. Mom wrapped my arm in a towel, (although I don’t remember it bleeding), and loaded us both up in the car along with the baby and scurried off to the doctor.
We lived on that farm until I was about five years old. I have a few more memories from there but not a lot. I was little and dad was busy trying to cut out a lifestyle of farming, with a whole brood of little boys tagging along all the time. I used to think dad was short on patience, but looking back now, I understand dad was actually a very patient man.
As us boys got older we were able to help more and cause less inconvenience, but I think that may have been a toss up. One time, dad was in the barn milking and I was unloading gravity wagons into the top of the corn dryer. In order to get the wagon close enough to the hopper on the elevator we had to do some fancy finagling while steering the tractor just so. The back tire of the tractor needed to get as close to the hopper as possible without touching it. Well, in my youthful inexperience, I got too close one time and instead of backing up, I decided to go up and over. Needless to say, all that tractor weight crushed the end of the elevator. Dad had to take the whole thing apart and straighten out the crushed steel and repair the chain tighteners that were all bent out of shape.
One time our non-farm cousins were helping us bale hay. Of course, they always wanted to drive the tractors. So, my older brother was letting one of them drive while taking an empty wagon out to the field. I’m not sure what was going on back there, but I was driving the baler and had to stop for a broken bale. My cousin wasn’t paying attention and he rammed into the wagon, throwing my grandpa off the wagon to the ground while bales of hay went flying in all directions. Of course, dad held us responsible for our irresponsible cousins. We laugh about all of it now, but at the time, it wasn’t funny to anybody.
There isn’t much left of that old farmstead today. The folks were renting back then and eventually they bought their own place and moved away. The house burned down a few years after we moved. All that’s left is an old machine shed and the barn, which is in its last days. Years of non-use and neglect have brought it to a sad end. The only memories we have left are what is in our heads – and a few pictures that mom managed to take.
In Revelation 21 the Apostle John gives this description of heaven: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”
We’ll have work to do in heaven, but it won’t be toil and affliction. We will be actively producing some kind of product that is referred to here as “splendor.” And nothing will deteriorate over time. However, what makes heaven really heaven is the unhindered, unrestricted, presence of our Lord. It will be the greatest experience of our eternal existence.
(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin).