The idea

C.S.Lewis and Bliss

“If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next ....Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”; aim at earth and you will get neither.” 

C.S. Lewis

Does anything live up to what you imagine? It doesn’t to me, my imagination is so much better than reality. The idea of something - that anticipation…. just seems to have a lot more pizazz than reality. That exotic beach vacation that you spent months planning, saving every quarter, dreaming about - then comes that first day of lugging things through scorching sand with sweat running down your face, two days later you're sticking by the pool because your sick of sand everywhere, and before it's over your sunburned and hoping to just close the blinds and hang out in the a/c.

I imagined getting out of prison for forty six long months and dreamed of walking out those gates. In the end they were simply gates and it was simply another day with a number of new worries on the horizon. Don’t get me wrong, I was so very thankful to leave, but it doesn’t take long to realize that we all are in a kind of prison. I could never see it before, how chained we are to our expectations, destined to disappointment because they never fully satisfy. 

It begs the question, does anything in this world fully satisfy?

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” 

C.S. Lewis

Is it possible that we can never be fully satisfied because this life is just a tiny taste on the tip of our tongues? That the feast is yet to come and Heaven is going to be better than your wildest dreams? That there is one place in the universe where imagination is eclipsed by experience. That’s what the Bible says, “That No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.”

Food for thought…..What if the next life is the fun one?

I mentioned last week how much I enjoyed NDE (Near Death Experience) stories. If you're a Christian, they are a glimpse into a future that just sounds awesome! Total satisfaction and contentment and a really cool universe to explore. I love talking about them because it gets me excited about what’s to come.

Understand, there are millions of these testimonies out there and most have startling commonalities. They’ve all caught a glimpse of the promised land and everybody wants to stay. Other than concern for people left here, nobody wants to come back to Earth.  

People say that Heaven is so real and so lucid and so utterly intense that it makes your experiences on earth seem hazy and out of focus…as if heaven is the reality and life as we know it is just a dream. Just consider if that’s true….

Don Piper, who spent ninety minutes clinically dead, said, “I saw colors I would never have believed existed. I’ve never, ever felt more alive than I did then. I was home; I was where I belonged. I wanted to be there more than I had ever wanted to be anywhere on Earth.”

Those who get a glimpse of Heaven agree on one thing more than anything else - love is the point of it all. In the presence of God they experience a love that words cannot explain and the people of Heaven seem to be filled with a light that is love. 

Four year old Colton Burpo had a brush with death and visited heaven. Several months later he asked his dad, Todd, if he’d had a grandpa named Pop. Todd said he had and told Colton that Pop had passed away when Todd was about Colton’s age.

Colton replied, “He’s really nice.”

Todd almost drove off the road. He said, “It’s a crazy moment when your son uses the present tense to refer to someone who died a quarter century before he was born.” Colton explained that he met Pop in Heaven and stayed with him awhile.

Todd pulled out a picture of Pop and showed it to Colton. Pop was sixty-two, with white hair and glasses. Colton looked at it, shook his head, and said, “Dad, nobody’s old in Heaven….and nobody wears glasses.”

Todd had his mom send a younger picture of Pop when he was twenty-nine, standing next to his wife (Colton’s great grandmother) who was now in her eighties. He showed it to Colton, who said, “Hey! How did you get a picture of Pop?” In the picture he didn’t recognize his great-grandmother in her twenties but recognized his twenty-nine year old great-grandfather he’d never met!

Most say that Heavenly bodies are the same shape and size as physical ones but seem to be almost transparent. Nobody is too skinny or too overweight and all heavenly bodies look to be about thirty years old. That’s funny because science says that our bodies grow and develop until sometime in our late twenties and early thirties, then we begin to slowly decay. Just another of the millions of small indicators that this world is only a precursor.

Dale Black, a pilot who was the only survivor of a plane crash, spent three days in Heaven and recalls this epiphany:

Part of the joy I was experiencing was not only the presence of everything wonderful but the absence of everything terrible. There was no strife, no sarcasm, no competition, no betrayal, no deception, no lies, no murders, no unfaithfulness, no disloyalty, nothing contrary to the light and life and love. The absence of sin was something you could feel. There was no shame, because there was nothing to be ashamed of. There was no sadness because there was nothing to be sad about. There was no need to hide, because there as nothing to hide from. It was all out in the open. 

Dale Black was a veteran commercial airline pilot. How could he and thousands of other people - doctors, bank presidents, tenured professors, who don’t need to make up wild stories to make money, come to describe an amazingly similar place?

Dr. Richard Elby was a nationally recognized physician and professor who saw this during his NDE:

I saw a forest of symmetrical trees unlike anything on earth. I could see each branch and not a brown spot or dead leaf in the forest. Stately grasses, each blade perfect and erect, were interspersed with ultra white four petalled flowers on stems two feet tall with a touch of gold at the centers. Then I sensed a strange new feel to the stems - no moisture. I felt them carefully. Delicately smooth, yet nothing like the earthly stems with their cellular watery content. Before I could ask, I had the answer: earthly water is hydrogen and oxygen for temporary life support; here Jesus is the Living Water. In His presence nothing dies. I instinctively looked behind me where I had been standing on dozens of blooms. Not one was bent or bruised. Then I watched my feet as I walked a few more steps upon the grass and flowers; they stood upright inside my feet and legs! We simply passed through on another.

If you’ve always seen Heaven as some far off shadowy place with clouds and harps, think again, this is the place of shadows. In the end, we’ll all see that Heaven has always been much more real than this world. 

But it’s easy to get distracted. It’s hard to remember your objective is to drain the swamp when you're up to your butt in alligators. And this world is brimming with alligators. But the one who counts the stars and calls them by their name, is in no danger of forgetting to provide for His own children. In this life and certainly not the next. 

Over the years I’ve heard so many people thank God for giving them another day on Earth and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, but I bet if we could truly comprehend what’s waiting on the other side, we’d want to leave today! For an eternal vacation, with an order of bliss on the side!