My older two sons have been asking a lot of good questions lately about Heaven. They want to know the details. How it works in plain language. They want the real life down to Earth explanation of everything; how old you are when you’re in Heaven, if you get any older while you are in Heaven and things like whether or not you can still see the people who are on Earth when you die, can you talk to people and meet new friends in Heaven, do you fly around or do you walk?…you get the point. Being that I am a person who truly believes Heaven to be a real place, a place where I plan to spend eternity with those who love God and without the pain and heartaches of this life, I want to give them an answer to their questions that strengthens their faith. What I am finding is that it may end up strengthening mine in the process.
I want to give them answers that help them to believe in something that they won’t see until they get there. Something that they have to just trust is better than they can imagine without having a concise story. Pop culture has done me no favors in this endeavor. Some say streets of gold, some say rivers of light, sometimes it looks like a city of glass, sometimes big overstuffed clouds cluttered with fat winged babies. Tough to make a rock solid mental image out of all that. I get it. I get the confusion. I’m thrilled with their questions and the interest they have in God and Heaven and how it all plays out. It makes me feel like my wife and I are doing something right. I am terrified however that the answers I might come up with for them will somehow scar them for life. What if I create a mental image for them of a Heaven they don’t care to visit? For me the “I’ll just find out when I get there” approach has seemed to work best, but that does nothing for a 5 year-old’s curiosity. Then I remembered my brief love affair with the mystical far off land of…Costa Rica, and then I got even more concerned with my answers.
I have never been to Costa Rica. I did however meet a young woman at a training session from Costa Rica a few months back, she was a bright, charming woman with an easy way about her that contrasted boldly against the burnt-out over-stressed drones that we all turn into in the Midwestern United States. Something about her seemed different, exotic. So the second day of the seminar a few of us asked her where she was from, originally. Costa Rica, she told us. She told of the wonderful climate both meteorological and political. She told of the diverse wildlife and the diverse culture. She told about beautiful tropical beaches and also about the mountains and rainforests. It sounded like a pretty cool place. Once she explained the low cost of living and the vast opportunities for ex-patriots to make a lavish living on modest means, it sounded downright magical. I did some research and watched some YouTube travel videos and realized that yes, Costa Rica does seem like a great place to escape to…maybe. It also has spiders the size of rats and rats the size of small dogs. There are poisonous snakes in the trees and alligators in the rivers. It borders some…let’s just say “democratically challenged” neighbors geographically and has more than its fair share of active volcanoes. Though the landscape is diverse and beautiful, there really is not all that much of it that is developed, be that good bad or otherwise to the standards we are used to here in the US. It is not the perfect place it looked to be at first blush. I soon went from being able to see myself taking my family to Costa Rica for an adventurous new life filled with sun, surfing and safari to being glad that I am settled in and safe in Ohio, where family is close and things are familiar. This brings me back to my explanation of Heaven to the boys.
How do I keep them on that high that I felt when I thought I had discovered the perfect place?
How do I paint the picture in their heads about Heaven that I feel in my heart?
How do I keep them from picturing the spiders, snakes and volcanoes?
Ok, that’s Costa Rica and not Heaven, but again, you get the point. It comes down to having faith that Heaven is wonderful because Jesus told us that it is. How do you explain faith to a five and seven year old? The dictionary defines faith as “belief that is not based on proof” and I have explained that to them, I think they might get it. But when I tell them to just have faith that Heaven is a wonderful place, it feels like a cop out. Heck, Disney World defines itself as a magical place better in a 60 second TV commercial than I have done with Heaven in an hour.
The struggle for a good explanation of Heaven continues…it’s really challenging me to define my own belief in what awaits as well. I am hopeful that the boys will teach me a thing or two by the time this is all said and done. I’ll keep you posted.
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