Of Heaven and Costa Rica

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.

2 Corinthians 5:7 (NIV)   “We live by faith, not by sight.”

Today is International Credit Union Day; celebrate by exercising your freedom to choose!

Freedom of choice is something most of us in the US take for granted.  We have hundreds of different restaurants to choose from.  We have dozens of auto manufactures competing for our garage space.  We even now have multiple Smartphone platforms to choose from to access the thousands of apps out there to spend our time on.   We are used to having choices in everything we do.

Most non-credit union people out there would feel that they have that same freedom of choice when it comes to their banking options, but if they only consider banks to do their banking do they really?  Banks, even under different names and different sizes all offer pretty much the same product, for the same reason…profit.

Banks may call their products by different names or have unique taglines, but they all focus on the same bottom line.  Like fast food burger joints.  One might have arches and another a crown but at the end of dinner they basically sell the same product at basically the same price to basically the same demographic.  Sure, the prize in the kid’s meal changes from time to time but you can always still get fries with that. 

Credit unions are like a Chipotle restaurant stuck in the burger joint mix.  We might not have as vast a menu and there are not as many of us out there, but if you look at the quality of what we offer, you can taste the difference.  The long term effects are far more positive dining at a place that serves fresh, simply prepared food.  The long term effects of dealing with a credit union are positive as well, less debt and increased wealth.  Facts prove it.  Wastelines and wallets don’t lie.

So this year, for ICU Day, celebrate the freedom of choice that credit unions give people.  We allow the members in our markets the freedom to do their banking a different way.  We allow them the freedom to have a vote, and a voice.  They have the freedom to choose among themselves who will lead them on the board.  They have the freedom to be treated as an owner and not just a number.  They have the freedom to choose people over profits.  It is why we do what we do and why October 21^st 2010 will certainly be a day I feel very proud of my credit union and the hard work we do day after day for our members.  Viva para la elección!

Where did all of the good conversation go?

As I walked through the grocery isle with my 18 month old son, discussing coffee and the finer points of its history and social importance in our culture it occurred to me that I need more adult conversation.

Not that I didn’t think that my son was worthy of this important bonding time, I just don’t think at his age he gives a hill of beans that even though darker roast coffee has a richer flavor it is in fact lower in the content of the all important caffeine component, as the caffeine is literally “burnt off” in the roasting process.

It occurred to me that perhaps this conversation, often interrupted by him throwing items out of the cart or randomly pulling them off of the nearest shelves and throwing them into the cart; “no thanks G…we don’t really need any orange marmalade today”, that I don’t have the chance…EVER…to just sit and chat aimlessly anymore about anything to any adult anywhere…

In college there were countless hours spent at coffee shops solving the world’s problems, amidst the occasional bout of studying.   There were the hours spent on a barstool chatting up with good friends about all of the things we would do once we had our degrees in hand.  There was the wonderful time my wife and I used to spend talking about all of the what-ifs ahead of us, before the kids and work zapped every last ounce of energy from us and left us with the ability to barely produce a half-hearted “G’night honey” before rolling over and passing out. 

Yes, life as a 30 something father of 3 just doesn’t include enough opportunity to talk about meaningless topics to adults in meaningful ways.  It’s something that will change, I know.  It is seasonal.  It too shall pass and there will come a time when I will have so much time to chat that I may actually run out of things to talk about…

Unlikely…but hey, so were all of the solutions to the world’s problems…until then, the kids will just have to put up with the occasional lecture about things not pertaining to them... and long drawn out stories about way back in the day, when their daddy was cool and the conversations were plenty.