We can find a love story written in the story of our faith in Revelation. The beauty and wonder of the Christian story is that it is set in a complex world of persecution in a community that believes in love and that challenges empire. John, the author of Revelation, tells the Christian story in a world that used violence to kill the One who is Love. John’s account begins with a greeting of peace for all eternity from the One who is and who was and who is to come.

Despite its violence, John’s revelation is the account of love forever—the love that created paradise, that healed the brokenness of humankind, that promises salvation through the divine love that enters human history. Revelation promises that the world of violence and death does not have the last word and instead offers us a world in which death is no more when heaven and earth become one. This new world is populated by the cloud of witnesses and is the story of love forever.

The new world John’s vision offers calls us back to the beginning: the beauty of the night, where the darkness was on the face of the deep, and the joy of the light of day. God saw that it was good. Out of that goodness, our faith and John’s vision of the future insist that every child should hear this story of love with a full tummy, clean water, loving arms, no worry of war, and in a bed in which they sleep each night. God tells us all, “I love you and set you free to love.”