Have you ever witnessed something so profoundly beautiful that it actually wounds you? A holy moment so breathtaking that you want to simultaneously pause it forever, as well as fast forward through it because it’s just simply too much to take in? These are the times where the boundary between Heaven and Earth seems to momentarily shatter, overwhelming our broken souls with the glory of God.

Very few people are fantasizing about heaven. And I get it. C.S. Lewis said you can only hope for what you desire, and frankly, most of our images of “heaven” just aren’t that desirable, so they don’t fill our souls with hope. I’m glad Stasi named it as a crisis of imagination because that is exactly what it is—not a crisis of doctrine, not even of belief, but of imagination. We can’t conceive of it, so we simply don’t think about it. Vague ideas do not awaken fantasies.

Having survived Y2K and come of age during the peak of the Left Behind series’ popularity, I am familiar with end-times musings. With these fictions and the very real advent of global warming and nuclear proliferation, our generation has never been far from the apocalypse. So yeah, I’ve thought about the end times. I’ve let my mind wander through some emergency scenarios, the same way I’ve pondered how to escape quicksand (lay back and float until you can grab a branch) or kill zombies (headshot, idiots). And yet, the Bible is not so glib.

Jesus is a notorious straight-shooter. It seems, though, that not all the language God employs is so self-evident. By way of example, consider the end of creation, where God looks at what he has done and says, “Good,” like creation was a functioning faucet.

Boredom shifts and nestles into the corners of the airport, accumulating like flies in the summer heat. My eyes glide and wander over the monotone steel blues to kill the time. They stop and catch.

The top-grossing films of every decade share something in common—the battle of good and evil. This is so basic to human instinct and understanding that you can't tell a good story without it. So why do we keep it tucked away in our stories and not let it actually inform our lives? The latest round of school shootings. The terrorist bombings. Hundreds of thousands of young girls disappearing…