“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10). We often tend to think and believe and act as if Heaven and Earth are completely distinct and separate from each other. We have a mortal life here on Earth, and, in a different time and place, if we are worthy enough, we will have a separate, distinct eternal life in Heaven. Such thinking may lead us to minimize or devalue one or the other - either we are so enthralled with the immediate pleasures and delights of the life on Earth that we disbelieve in or discount the distant and perhaps even hypothetical rewards awaiting us in some Heaven that we can’t yet fully comprehend and may not even exist; or, we get so enraptured by the prospect of some imaginary and utopian vision of painless and endless heavenly bliss that we come to despise the challenges and opportunities of this frustrating and benighted earthly existence. This mortal life is not the kale salad that we have to suffer through before we have earned our chance to dig into the heavenly desserts that await us, nor is it our last glorious cheat day before we quit cold turkey and endure an eternity of low-fat, low-carb afterlife. This time on Earth is our life. Our premortal experiences with our Heavenly Parents before we were born is our life. The Kingdom of Glory that we enter after the final judgment is our life. It is all one uninterrupted continuum. As President Russell M Nelson has taught, “the very things that will make your mortal life the best it can be are exactly the same things that will make your life throughout all eternity the best it can be!” (Russell M Nelson, “Think Celestial”). God sees no difference between Heaven and Earth. It is all one before His eyes. He is the shining light on the hill that we should struggle up towards, and He is the hard rock beneath us that gives us a firm place to stand. He beckons us to be better than we are, but He also sends His Son Jesus Christ to toil with us through the mud and the blood and help us keep going. What we do on Earth has consequences in Heaven. When we serve the least of our brothers and sisters, we are only serving God. When we bring one soul unto Christ, there is joy in Heaven. If we are sometimes discouraged and distressed by how far apart Heaven and Earth seem to be and we pray to our Father to send His angels to clean all of this up, we should not be surprised if one of the angels He sends is us. Undoubtedly all of the prophecies and promises made in the scriptures will all be fulfilled, but we do not have to wait until the Second Coming to start making Earth a little more like Heaven, and we don’t have to wait until the Resurrection to make our own life here on Earth a little more like it will be in the Celestial Kingdom.
