Heaven

“This must be what heaven feels like.” I surprised myself when that statement came out of my mouth. I had been taking prednisone to treat some poison ivy I had gotten into. Prednisone is a powerful anti-inflammatory drug, that took away all of my aches and pains. I had been sitting for a long time working on the sofa with my laptop. When I got up, I suddenly realized that I did not hurt anywhere. That’s when I said, without any thought, “This must be what heaven feels like.”

We don’t talk much about heaven any more in church. Growing up in Pentecostal churches, we talked a lot about heaven. We sang songs such as When We All Get to Heaven and I’ll Fly Away. We regularly heard sermons on heaven. During Sunday night testimony time the saints regularly talked about wanting to see Jesus and what they wanted to do when they got to heaven. In hindsight, maybe we were, as some saints used to say, “so heavenly minded we were no earthly good.”

But there were many reasons why we focused more on heaven back then. Life was not as pleasant for Christians then as it now. We were often ridiculed for our faith in school and at work. People who did not drink alcohol were “weird”. People in my church didn’t have much money. The world was in the midst of the Cold War. We were reminded once or twice every school year during our air raid drills just how unsafe the world was. Nikita Khrushchev’s promise to bury the U.S. and the USSR’s build up of missiles in Cuba were constant reminders that nuclear war was a very real threat. Maybe we dealt with all of the anxiety of our lives by focusing on life hereafter.

But, then maybe we have swung too far the other way. Do we as Christian long to see Jesus? Have we become too comfortable here in this life, that we are no longer pilgrims in a strange land? Do we see this life as an end to itself or as a tryout for the life hereafter?

These thoughts of mine regarding heaven were reinforced recently when I heard Carrie Underwood’s song, Temporary Home. The words in the chorus are:

This is my temporary home, it's not where I belong
Windows and rooms that I'm passing through
This was just a stop on the way to where I'm going
I'm not afraid because I know this was my temporary home
This is our temporary home

See the video at: http://myplay.com/videos/carrie-underwood/temporary-home?locale=US


I think I need to spend more time thinking about the temporal nature of this life. James 4:13-14 says, “ Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.