From the time our kids were small, they’ve wondered about heaven. One night during supper, Stephen, our eldest, asked, “When you die, do they take you to the body shop?”
“Sort of,” I laughed. “But your spirit goes to be with Jesus.”
“I don’t wanna go to heaven,” said Jeffrey. “All we’re gonna do is sit around and talk. That’s all grownups do. Boring. And we’re just gonna worship God all the time. With a worship band and stuff.”
“And there won’t be dogs in heaven,” added Rachael. “If Mojo won’t be there, I don’t wanna go.”
“The Bible doesn’t say dogs won’t be in heaven,” I said. “Just cats.” Rachael wrapped me on the knuckles with a spoon.
I tried to paint a picture for them of an awesome world beyond our wildest imaginings. A world where Jesus reigns, where we grow and learn and thrive in the presence of Joy itself.
Rachael had been reading The Chronicles of Narnia, so I asked her to grab the seventh book and read the final paragraph. She did, sharing a passage that spoke of the end of their earthly adventures being just the beginning of a greater story—one where every chapter is better than the last, and that stretches on forever.
All too quickly the three of them were acquainted with the end of some stories. The car crash of a friend. And two cousins who lost a long battle with Huntington’s Disease. We grieved together. And talked of that place where our tears would be wiped dry.
When two aunts and an uncle died of this awful disease, we grieved some more. When their grandparents, who lived with us for five years, succumbed to dementia, they wept like never before. So I read them Revelation 21:4 where death will be no more, nor sadness, nor crying, nor pain.
We grieved. But not without hope.
I need that hope today as my golfing buddy Mike was just diagnosed with ALS.
Beside my Mom’s bed was Joni Eareckson Tada’s book on heaven. Paralyzed in a diving accident at 17, Joni has been a quadriplegic a miraculous 58 years. Despite physical pain, her life has been graced by a profound peace.
One Sunday her minister asked the congregation to kneel—impossible for her in a wheelchair. “With everyone kneeling I couldn’t stop the tears,” she wrote. “Sitting there I was reminded that in heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick, and do aerobics. And the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus. I, with shriveled, bent fingers, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness—powerful and dazzling.”
Amid the loss, the doubts, the loneliness, the fear, the hope of heaven glistens in the distance, reminding us to press on until that day when will see Him as He is, and everything will be out of this world.
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