Counting Sand

You may consider counting grains of sand impossible. You have probably never considered counting them at all. Yet there was once was a man who tried to do exactly that. Archimedes, a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor and astronomer, once set out to determine the number of grains of sand that could fit into the universe. Although he lacked the evidence to support his final calculation, in his journey to doing so he shaped a lot of our human perspective today.

You see, Archimedes’ quest wasn’t about playing in a giant sandbox. What Archimedes did was redefine our concept of the universe and lay the foundations to the number systems that we continue to use today.

So what does this have to do with me?

Exactly two years ago today, I envisioned from my bed the vastness of all the ways in which I could choose to live my life. Like grains of sand, I saw like little packages the reality of every split moment and decision I had and could live by. Faint threads interwove the fabric of all that I could be and I felt this all the way into my very bones.

I also saw that this was the same for every human being. In all the tremendous moments of my own conscious revelation, I also realized how every thread of my being was intimately connected to every person in every moment I ever had or would choose.

I believe this is the moment where most people wake up. They remember, realize and live the dream, mapping their way through the best versions of a dying memory. Before that point, however, in all that fulfillment I saw just one empty space – I noticed that just one grain of sand was unaccounted for. This void felt infinitely greater than all the summation of everything else I saw – a small window into the rest of the story.

I asked a question and in response, I found myself looking not at a universe filled with sand, not at a giant play space, but at heaven itself.

Heaven is not a place on earth. It’s not something man can create, it’s not even something we can define. We can change the way we see our universe, we can drastically alter the ways by which we define it, and we can even learn to recognize the patterns of the fabric which holds it together. But on the other side of all that is natural, there lies something more.

When the curtain tore at the crucifixion of a man named Jesus, humanity gained direct access to what, until that moment, was lost to man. For the first time, we got to see beyond the veil and it wasn’t just the fabric that hung from a religious ceiling.

It takes daily practiced (and often failed) humility that I live by this truth today. When I woke up that day, my purpose became more than my daily task, more than my greatest goals, and more than myself. It became, not just about waking up others from their radical dreams in order to live them, but to frame the vision beyond the veil.

If I must count every grain of sand until the missing One is recognized in the least, I will count myriads upon myriads and myriads for the moment that we all ask the question:

Is heaven for real?

Point One has been a two year process in painting this vision to an earthly canvas. This will never be about a pulpit, a demand or condemnation. This is about experiencing the redeeming and healing reality of the unknown that we cannot account for on our own. It’s not about the sandbox.