I don’t think its possible to know whether or not someone
else is going to heaven. I believe
I can know for myself, because I can, at least to some degree, know
myself. I can see through the hole
in my heart and know that I am not worthy of the Vision that waits. I can bear witness to the Spirit of the
Living God in me that repairs it whole and gives a sidelong glimpse at the
Vision.
It is really easy for us to see the holes in all of us. Even though the junior high girls
scream at us across social media, “you don’t know me” we do and we can
see. For those of us willing to
look and willing to admit it: we are, all of us, broken.
But the fixing is harder to know when we are looking across
the table instead of in the mirror.
We can guess and there are strong indicators in another’s history (where
they came from and where they are now), their habits and where they spend their
resources (time and money), but we may not be able to ever know. At the very least, I am not sure if I
can know.
One of the greatest failures of the human imagination is the
notion that heaven is boring. Even
if you don’t believe in a god or any kind of heaven, it is criminal to think
that eternity in such a place would ever become dull. I do NOT think it will be static, repeating the same lines
of the same hymn over and over again.
There are so many more songs to be written to pay homage to the Great
Songwriter. Can you imagine the
tunes we will come up with when our musicians have all the time in eternity to
collaborate in endless ways with, as yet, unimagined instruments? Or what about the additional
wavelengths that will be audible in our heaven-sent ears? Another ten octaves on each extreme
that we will have to play with!
And that is just the music. Do you know how many ways there are to pay respects to the
Creator Artist God, who made the Turritopsis
Nutricula, a jellyfish that has the potential for biological immortality? Like patrons in a gallery, we stop to
stare at His genius and marvel at His creativity. What we will see then that we cannot see now? Will we fly through the sun to see its
explosive engine at work? Will we
dance along the dark matter to finally know its name? Will we follow a quark as it skips across space-time?
And despite my attempt
at heaven imagination, I still haven’t thought of things God has waiting to
reveal…
If you ever catch yourself thinking that heaven is a drag,
you haven’t exercised your creative muscles enough. Your imagination is getting fat.
I wonder if I will be able to meet new people, chat with
them for a while about what the earth was like when they walked it is a
mortal. Naturally, I will have to
schedule appointments on calendaring software that counts decades like they
were days. But I won’t feel like I
have to rush and no one will be bothered if I have to reschedule.
We will bring a smile to the face of the Storyteller when we
stop to hear each other’s narrative, how the Storyteller wove pain, hope and
Resurrection into each one of our tales.
I hope that I will have the chance to sit down for a year
with Dostoevsky and ask him about his time in exile. He will finally be able to look back on it without cringing,
since there will be so much beauty surrounding us in every direction. He will tell me how the darkness of
that time on earth has only served to make the Light here seem stronger.
I wonder if (if, because I cannot know he will be there) I
will be able to catch up with President Lincoln. I want to hear the part of his story when he first got the
news that the South had seceded.
What does the weight of a shattered nation feel like? What measure of Hope was kindled in his
heart to see him through that war?
I hope, someday, to spend time with my Grandfathers. I was a child when my Grandpa Zuercher
passed away and I was barely an adult when my Grandpa Bryson breathed his last.
There are so many things that the husband/father/pastor/man
in me wants to ask them…
