On separate occasions during the last year or two, I’ve asked both my parents if they think about heaven much. It’s a reasonable question, I think, given their age and declining state of health.
My mom and dad are committed believers who aspired to serve God throughout their eight-plus decades of life. But when I asked them this question, they both said no.
At first, I was a bit taken aback by their decidedly un-Billy Graham-like answer. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. They’ve always taken a concrete, non-naval-gazing approach to life, and their faith and study of scripture has always tilted toward practical application, rather than lofty rhetoric.
My dad, specifically, is a mechanical engineer who spent his life solving problems and inventing solutions. Along the way, though, he also realized there are some things we just can’t know—including what heaven is going to be like.
“How can we know that?” he asked me once. “We’re going to be different. Not only are we going to be changed, but we’re going to be eternal. I don’t think anybody really understands eternity.”
In a way, he said, we’re like caterpillars contentedly munching away on tomato plants, with no possible way to imagine the transformation that’s about to happen to them.
“A caterpillar just can’t understand butterflies, even though it’s going to be one,” he explained. “The Bible says we don’t know what we will be like, but we will know what we will be when we see Him. I don’t think we can understand, so I don’t really dwell on it.”
My parents don’t talk about their eternal home much, or in ways that we might expect at this point in their lives. And that’s OK—God knows their hearts and understands how they are wired.
For me, though, the thought of them being in heaven—free from pain, fully restored in every way, reunited with loved ones and embraced by their perfect, loving heavenly Father—brings great comfort and peace.
Beyond that, I guess I’m a bit like my dad in that I’ve never dwelt much on heaven either. Increasingly, however, I do feel the tension between the now and the not yet, the fact that we are foreigners and exiles in this world, the reality that our true citizenship is in heaven. (1 Peter 2:11, Philippians 3:20)
Maybe it’s a maturing realization of a sense I’ve had most of my life—that feeling of not really belonging anywhere, at least not completely. The closest I come here on earth is at home, surrounded by the people who know and love me best. When I get to heaven, though, I wonder if my first impression will be similar to what the great Narnian horse Jewel experienced at the end of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle.
“I have come home at last!” he exclaims as he enters the new Narnia. “This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”
I can imagine feeling that way—maybe you can too.
And then there’s the question of whether, once we arrive in heaven, we will want to ask God about all the trials and sufferings that we didn’t understand here on earth. Will we be able to see—finally—why things happened the way they did, or will we simply not care anymore?
I don’t know, of course. But the way Max Lucado addresses it in his book Traveling Light makes me look forward this future home of ours even more.
“One thing is certain,” he writes. “When the final storm comes and you are safe in your Father’s house, you won’t regret what he didn’t give. You’ll be stunned at what he did.”
♥ Lois
This post is part of a collection called Help for Parent Loss. To read more, please click here.
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