by Jimmy Ettele

Created on: January 03, 2009

I tried. Truly, as a child, when I thought like a child, I tried to believe as the clouds parted and the sun rays shone I would have been standing in front of the Heavenly gates. Greeted by an angel or some saint clothed in robes and holding some sort of scepter with a large book with a seemingly endless number of pages with names scribbled all over it. There I would stand, in front of the gates that would lead me to Heaven. Like the cloud city of Bespin, I could see a city within the sky. Gold turrets and castles and harps and angels and sunshine. It was the utopia my parents had planted into my imagination just as their parents had loaded their imaginations. Sadly enough, the cloud city that my pious and god fearing soul may have one day inhabited, joined by dead loved ones, has crashed to the all too real Earth. As I became an adult, I thought like an adult, leaving behind silly superstitions and paradises set aside for the obedient. It might actually involve more imagination to behold a place like Heaven in your mind than it would to understand that God's campus of angels, saints, and your grandparents is nothing more than a state of being located somewhere in the frontal lobe of our brains.

A quick run through your King James or your New International Bible and you'll see the ambiguousness given towards the description of Heaven. Surely we know about the gates adorned with pearl. We know the longitude and latitude is somewhere in the troposphere and we know about the gold. What we do not get, from the definitive word of God, are specifics about Heaven. With so much emphasis placed on Heaven being mere mortals' reward for their subservience and devotion to their lord, you might think the Almighty would have given us a more clear picture of what lies ahead for all our years of indenture. Instead we are treated to biblical accounts, very mortal and of the time accounts of what Heaven is. So, the residence of Christianity's savior and lord is shrouded in a vale of secrecy for only the worthy to discover?

Heaven exudes all bias images from man. If we were to sit down and think about what Heaven looks like the majority of our images would resemble each other. Gold, gates, angels, castles, lots of sunshine. Brilliantly colored white and what could only be described as a fraternity mixer being attended by all the people you lost throughout your life(consequently, those people you lost are exactly how you, I stress you, remember them, though your parents or someone

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