On the drive home this evening as I encountered a serene Nebraska sunset and reflected on the hospitality I had just received, my grandma Iola’s words came to mind: All this and heaven, too.

Yep, all this and heaven, too.

Worship hit a reset button in me tonight. I was reset from faulty thinking. Reset from navel-gazing. Reset from myself. Reset to heaven. “Heaven, too” seems to be the focus of Grandma’s phrase and Tobey drove the point home from the pulpit tonight. From Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, the truth is clear: we can’t make it to heaven on our own. The standard of perfection, though we certainly attempt to attain it, can’t be reached, no way, no how. All of us, try as we may to avoid it, deal with anger, lust, lies, despising one another. But there is good news, there is Christ. He died for our sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, God’s gift to us. Heaven, too? Yes, definitely, by the grace of the cross.

The “all this” swept over me on my short country drive. As a lullaby played from the CD player, my beautiful (hilarious, vivacious, sweet, fill-in-the-blank) daughter rested in the back seat. Liv can be such a handful at times, but goodness, my cup runneth over with her. Today I marveled at how and why God gave someone as wonderful and complex as Liv to two people like Jeremy and me. God only knows. Tonight my heart is full.

“All this” also includes Redeemer, our church. Week after week I am encouraged by Tobey’s preaching, by good friends, by opportunities to serve the body of Christ, and, I’ll be honest, by a good cup of coffee. “All this” for Redeemer includes a pretty amazing gift: a new church home. When we began meeting at Zion last June (we are, afterall, Zion’s daughter church), we anticipated moving out of that location within months. We prayed a lot for wisdom, continued to seek out new meeting places, and nothing worked out. Well, the hand of God moved, someone from Faith United Church of Christ contacted Tobey (I’m sure there’s another story here!), and we learned that they wanted to give this church away. The church, located in exactly in an area of town we want to serve, was dwindling in numbers and the leadership wanted it to be used—not as blacktop for game days, but as a house of God. (If we do end up with a few parking spots, I’m sure we’ll use them on game days. But that’s not the point of this paragraph.) In fact, when I toured the building initially, it was completely clear that the church wanted to give us everything—all the furnishings, all the fixtures, all the plates and spoons in the kitchen. A dollar was exchanged, to make things legal or something, and now we have a building. Unbelievable.

All this and heaven, too?

Absolutely.

God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good.