…Did you ever see, The Wizard of Oz? Remember how Dorothy and her three friends go off in search of the things they each want most in the whole world? Things they feel they either lost or never had to begin with? One wants courage, one intelligence, one a heart, and one a true home. The moral of that story is that you really don’t have to embark on a long journey to a see a wizard in order to secure those things. In fact, if you really want to find them, you probably don’t have to look farther than your own backyard.

Heaven is a little like that. People think of it as something so far off, so unclear and hazy, that they can’t focus on it. They don’t realize that what they’re looking for is right under their nose…

To put it simply, our final destination as humans is not some unidentified point of light zillions of miles from where we are now. Nor is it some psychological state of mind. Our final destination, ironically, is right here on good old planet Earth. The Bible makes it crystal clear that at least part of heaven will be this "new Earth." And it will be the same earth we’ve lived on during our lifetimes, the same Earth that has been the home to billions of human beings over the long course of history. But like human beings, the Earth itself is going to experience a death and resurrection of sorts…