Renovations in Heaven
When I was very small I used to think the sound of thunder was caused by God moving his furniture about.
"There goes the sideboard," I would think to myself, lying in bed and staring up at a safe ceiling as a long, rolling, sonorous booming stretched across the skies.
My four or five year old imagination pictured a venerable old man with long white beard and hair, his bare feet stuffed into brown sandals, panting with exertion as he pushed and shoved an over-laden old sideboard across the wooden floors of Heaven.
For, of course, Heaven had to have wooden floors for all that noise to be made.
There would be a sudden sharp crack as vases or plates crashed to the floor, and then the sideboard would trundle on again.
What would that pre-school imagination have made of the events of recent weeks?
Had God given up on furniture moving and begun concentrating on a little house painting, taken out a spray gun and started painting heaven orange or red?
In His eagerness to get the job done was He being over zealous, with the result that half a continent was painted red?
You know what it's like when you return from a trip to the Centre or even not that far into the outback. Red is everywhere.
Red doesn't belong in our gardens and homes; it belongs in the Kimberley or the Territory.
There the visitor can only gasp in awe at its strength, its nobility, and its almost godlike stature.
Everywhere you turn sheer red cliffs rise high above, imposing their ancient power, their invulnerability upon you.
Red gorges draw you down to their shady depths; inveigle you along rocky paths with promises of more riches to come.
Flowers are red, dragonflies are red, the blue waters themselves become red with the reflection of the cliffs above.
You can almost feel the heart of the land beating in that red earth, watch as it flings itself skyward, whirling dervishly as it spins, enveloping everything in its erratic path.
Red clings to you as you walk.
It follows your car in a soft, billowing cloud, sneaking into whatever orifice it can find, silently taking possession, stealthily extending its power. And when you return home it is there, in the door jambs of the car, the dashboard, the interior fittings, the engine.
It spills out of socks and pockets, it clogs up soles of boots, ingrains itself around collars and cuffs. From there it transfers itself to the drum of the washing machine; runnels of red water run off the car, down the driveway and settle in pools along the edge of the grass.
A long reminder of a wonderful trip; but in such instances we ourselves have been the instruments of transference, and red is concentrated in human size piles of defilement. God's palette is much wider, his aim none too precise.
I don't know how much of Heaven actually got painted, but the excess surely dripped over everything down here.
What had been a few patches of inconvenience as a result of our own doings turned into suffocating blankets of red-orange sludge, caking cars and verandahs, blotting views from windows, turning a once multi-coloured garden into a uniform dullness of dust.
Nothing seemed to move it, until.......
My young self might have imagined God tiring of the colour red and hosing it all off with torrential storms as He prepared for His next experiment with colour - white!
Yes, suddenly that spray gun was churning out little white balls until the entire earth was coloured white.
The red/green grass disappeared and the brown of the flower beds, the few red rose petals still surviving sank beneath the sudden onslaught, and , of course, there was not a hint of the red dust of a couple of days previously.
The car, once a dirty, sticky orange, was turned into a shining, sparkling white charger, and the orange bucket was filled with little white balls, perfect for cooling a bottle of wine.
Yet, still God couldn't have been happy with His experiment on earth because He started to slowly restore everything to its original hue. What was He thinking of His Heavenly renovations now?
Was He getting bored with white and ready for another colour change?
What will it be? And will we be ready for it? What would I have thought all those years ago? Maybe it is time for God to carpet His floors and settle down to enjoy His newly decorated surroundings, and leave us down here to enjoy just a bit of peace and quiet for a while.