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Being
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Add to FavoritesAs a young teen, I spent a summer babysitting my younger cousins at their home. A poster depicting Heaven hung on their bedroom wall. It showed a cartoon castle of gold, nestled in the clouds, open pearly gates, etc. It looked just as my aunt and various Sunday school teachers had said it did. Their faith told them so.
Despite these descriptions, however, I never truly believed in a physical Heaven. I couldn't have told you why I didn't believe. I just didn't. For many of my childhood years, I did, however, feel guilty about not believing in the physical golden Heaven, and not truly in the physical God-on-a-throne either. I felt guilty for my lack of faith, but I still couldn't believe. That would have been lying.
Nowadays, and for many years since my teens, I no longer feel guilty for not sharing the faith of those who believe in a physical Heaven. My conception of religion has dissolved into a vague sense of spirituality that I would call open-to-wonder. I don't feel the need to commit to any particular belief other than an inner sense of rightness.
I believe that many religions share core values because we all have an inner sense of rightness. I don't believe that the details matter much. I don't believe that we must all believe the same thing.
I don't believe that Heaven is a real physical place, but I am open to the possibility of Heaven as a state of being-perhaps a plane of existence, as in "the other side of the veil." I would call the veil ignorance or confusion, or perhaps just an imaginary separation between physical and non-physical experience.
I don't require an afterlife to give my present experience meaning, because I truly feel grateful for what I experience now. I do sense an afterlife, or perhaps I have a very vivid imagination. Some things, such as the existence of an afterlife, of deceased ancestors, spirit guides, etc., feel right. Some things, such as a golden Heaven and a punishing God, just don't feel right.
As an older teen, a man on the street handed me a flier with a cartoon picture of a blonde God disembarking from a golden spaceship to collect the earth's children and jet them up to Heaven. That description didn't feel right to me, either.
One of my cousins grew into a Christian missionary. I don't know if he still imagines Heaven as a golden city graced by the presence of God on a throne. For me, Heaven is love and beauty and everything that feels right and good. That's my reality, at least for now.
Learn more about this author, Sara Mcgrath.
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Place
To quote the old Sunday School song: "Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace, I wanna see my Savior's face, heaven is a wonderful place (wanna go there)."
When Jesus left the earth He said, "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going;" John 14:1-4.
Jesus spoke of His Father's house, a figure of speech denoting the place where His Father, God, dwells. In a prayer to God in Deuteronomy 26:15, Moses said, "Look down from your holy habitation, from heaven." Plainly, heaven is God's dwelling place. In another prayer to God in 1 Kings 8:30, Solomon pleads for God to "listen in heaven, your dwelling place."
Heaven certainly is a place: the place where God lives.
Did you notice the end of Jesus' statement about His Father's house? He said He was leaving to prepare a room and would return to receive His own so that they might be with Him. Then He adds, "You know the way to where I am going." In other words, "You know how to get to heaven."
How?
Thomas asked Jesus the same question. "Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?' Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me;'John 14:5-6.
The only way to get to heaven-more importantly, to get to the Father who is in heaven-is go through Jesus Christ. What does that mean? Does that mean we use His name like a magic word tacked on to the end of prayers? No, it means that we believe in Him.
"Whoever believes in [the Son of God] may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God;" John 3:15-18.
Heaven is that place where those who believe in Jesus will live eternally. It is real, it is imminent, and it is open to all who come through Jesus Christ-by trusting in Him.
Learn more about this author, Jason Arsenault.
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