Your Home In Heaven

When Marco Polo returned to his home town of Venice after many years in the Orient, his friends thought his long journeys had driven him mad. He had such incredible tales to tell.

Marco had travelled to a city full of silver and gold. He’d seen black stones that burned, but no one had ever heard of coal. He’d seen a cloth that refused to catch fire even when thrown into the flames, but no one had ever heard of asbestos. He talked of huge serpents ten paces long with jaws wide enough to swallow a man, nuts the size of a man’s head and white as milk inside, and a substance spurting from the ground that actually set lamps alight. But no one had ever seen crocodiles, coconuts, or crude oil. They just laughed at such stories.

Years later, when Marco lay dying, a devout man at his bedside urged him to recant all the tall tales he’d told. But Marco refused: “It’s all true—every bit of it. In fact, I have not told half of what I saw.”

The Bible writers who give us glimpses of heaven seem to echo Marco Polo’s sentiment. In vision they looked on a place so brilliant, so fantastic, that they could describe only a fraction of what they saw. And we face a challenge similar to that of Marco Polo’s friends. We must try to imagine the “crocodiles and coconuts” that we’ve never seen, because the glimpses we do get in the Bible show us that heaven is much more than sitting on clouds and playing on harps.