What Will Heaven be Like ?

Manila (or indeed any city) is not my soul’s natural habitat and so periodically I make my escape, usually to the Cordillera mountain range in the north where I have a selection of hide-outs, towns and villages, clefts in the rock where I can find restoration after the assaults of city life. I chose a familiar one this week where I could just rest without going into explorer mode. My chosen inspirational material was a book about heaven.

We don’t hear much about heaven. Some say we will be singing a lot …. but somehow after what we have and will still have to go through to get there, there must be something a whole lot better than just singing!

We may think of redemption as being Jesus putting right everything we did wrong, re-writing our life stories through His saving sacrifice such that everything was as it should have been lived out, down to the smallest detail. Then heaven must be that we reign with Him as the men and women we were created to be, every heart’s desire fulfilled, every creative urge running to its end. And yet there is not much in our current situation to suggest this. There is only the occasional glimpse or a flash back from the Eden we lost but still see around us like bread crumbs to keep us on the trail.

I have a friend who has a fish farm in the middle of a crater lake. The houses around the lake have no electricity so at night the sky is lit up with a beautiful array of stars, also reflected on the still surface of the water. Another hideout I frequent is often visited by an eagle who circles above the peaks as I watch in the valley. This week it was a rainbow I saw above the rice fields as a powerful storm moved in towards the town and breath-taking sunsets! How beautiful heaven must be in all its glory.

Often life seems utterly tragic and far from glorious but even in its brokenness we see the promise. I met an old lady with Alzheimer’s this week, who had only two memories left. She was perhaps in her 90’s, and told me about her childhood when she went to stay in the dormitory of the Belgian nuns who opened the first school in their town up in the mountains. She was in the first intake, first in her family to go to school and the first to become Catholic. Her memory was a happy one and very detailed. And on a loop, she must have told me 10 times but she was enjoying it so much that I stayed and listened again. The other memory was how much she loved God, she spoke of Him with such affection and joy, also several times. I imagine she will be seeing heaven before too long and she will be fully restored, her youth and beauty, her mind and memories, all her hardships and disappointments erased, all things perfected. And then the real adventure begins. An eternity of joy where she can do all she ever wanted to do and was created for. This is also our hope and His promise.