When the Last Tent Comes Down

In 2005, Biloxi, Mississippi, was a landscape of ruin. Hurricane Katrina had flattened neighborhoods down to their concrete slabs. Families lived in FEMA trailers for months, then years. Mary Carter, a seventy-two-year-old grandmother, spent three years in a cramped trailer with her daughter and two grandchildren, cooking meals on a hot plate, hanging laundry between aluminum walls. She kept a photograph of her old kitchen taped above the tiny sink — not out of nostalgia, but as a promise. "That kitchen is coming back," she told her grandchildren. "Better than before."

When volunteers from Habitat for Humanity finally handed her the keys to a new house in 2008, Mary walked through every room touching the walls, the countertops, the doorframes. When she reached the kitchen, she stood at the sink and wept. Not grief — relief. The long waiting was over. She peeled the old photograph from her pocket, looked at it one last time, and set it down. She didn't need it anymore. The real thing had come.

This is the promise of Revelation 21. The Almighty, seated on His throne, declares, "Behold, I am making all things new." Every FEMA trailer of our broken world — every grief, every diagnosis, every graveyard — is temporary. God is not renovating the old creation. He is handing us the keys to something we have only seen in photographs. And on that day, He will wipe every tear, because the real thing will have finally come.