As our plane descended toward New York’s LaGuardia Airport, our nine-year-old granddaughter, Emmie, pressed her face to the window. From about three thousand feet, the city lights spread out below us like spilled jewels. “Look, Gigi,” she exclaimed to my wife, Lori, “The whole city is opening up to me.”
Lori and I had planned to visit Brooklyn months ago for our grandson’s first birthday. Only a few weeks before departure did we decide to bring Emmie along.
I smiled with satisfaction as her voice carried across the aisle, grateful we had made this happen for one of our grandchildren.
Where do we lose it, that “the whole city is opening up to me” anticipation?
The woman seated next to me, from upstate New York, had made this flight many times. The glittering view drew only a ho-hum from her.
Looking down, I felt my own heart quicken, not for the city as it is, but for something pristine and pure that rises above the dirty streets, dingy alleyways, and dreary tenements I knew lurked below.
Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God as Rome crumbled. Invaders had sacked the great city in 410, and many wondered whether the world’s greatest empire had been humankind’s last, best hope. Augustine answered that two cities exist: one built on love of self and the other on love of God. Of the second, he wrote, “a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for…”
I believe something within us longs for that city whose lights shine in the darkness and cannot be extinguished.
Scripture says as much. Hebrews tells us that Abraham “looked forward to the city with foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (11:10), and that “here we do not have an enduring city, but we seek the city that is to come” (13:14). And the Apostle John, exiled on Patmos, saw that city descending, “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). It needs “no sun or moon, for the glory of God gives it light, and its gates are never shut” (21:23-25).
No wonder we are restless. Augustine said it best in his Confessions: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” The cities we build dazzle from a distance and disappoint up close, but the ache they awaken is not foolish. It is a homing signal from the One who promised to prepare a place for us (John 14:2).
Emmie had not yet learned to ho-hum. She didn’t know about the grime below. She saw only light, and she believed it was somehow meant for her. Jesus said we must become like little children to enter the kingdom (Matthew 18:3), and perhaps this is part of what he meant.
Maybe the question isn’t how we lose that wonder, but how we get it back. Someday may we press our faces to the window of heaven’s approach and, as its lights draw near, say with a child’s whole heart, “Look, the whole city is opening up to me.”