Filled with Songs of Forever

"My heart is filled with songs of forever
The city that endures when all is made new
I know I don't belong here, I'll never
Call this place my home, I'm just passing through"
-Dustin Kenrue

Recently a close friend of mine lost her father after a three month battle to cancer. These experiences often lead us to ask the question of "why". Why did this person have to die? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? Why isn't life full of sunshine and rainbows? These are questions that nobody has ever been able to avoid, and the hardest thing is that no matter how long we think about them we will never be able to come up with an answer. What the majority of us need to be reminded of is that"...we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" -Romans 8:28.

With this verse in my head we I move on from the question of "why" to the question of "where". This may seem like an odd question but the more I have sought after an answer the more important I believe it to be.

If someone was planning a trip, would you not research your destination before you left? I find it very unlikely for one to travel to Argentina not having found out what the weather is like, or the terrain, the language, the people, the food, the currency. In the same way, we as God loving people are planning to go to heaven after this life, is it not right to find out whatever we can about Heaven? To get excited about it, to anticipate it? If God didn't want us to know about Heaven I do not think he would have told us so much about it.
Whenever someone tells me that Heaven is going to be greater than anything I can imagine, they might believe they are encouraging me but really they are just discouraging me. I do not want to hear about the never-ending sing-along in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen. My father died 13 years ago and I think my mom said it best "if heaven is just singing hymns one after another, I feel so sorry for your father because he hated to sing."

"Every pleasurable experience we know about life on Earth we have experienced through our senses. So, when Heaven is portrayed as beyond the reach of our senses, it doesn't invite us, instead it alienates and even frightens us. Our misguided attempts to make Heaven sound spiritual (non-physical) merely succeed in making Heaven sound unappealing." -Randy Alcorn

As human beings, God created us to be both physical and spiritual. We are not created to dwell in a non-physical state. In the same way God did not create us with a desire to eat gravel. When we try to acquire a desire for a disembodied existence in a non-physical heaven it is like trying to develop an appetite for gravel. No matter how hard we try we will not be able to succeed in gaining an appetite for gravel. What God did give us a desire for is a resurrected life, in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ, on a resurrected Earth.


I am not looking forward to dancing and singing in the clouds when I die. I am looking forward to doing a lot of the same things I enjoy here on Earth, I look forward to hiking mountains and biking trails, to climbing cliffs and paddling rivers. I look forward to enjoying God's New Creation to the fullest because that is how he will be glorified. That is a heaven I can get excited for, one that can keep me up at night because I'm giddy with excitement.


I feel that C.S. Lewis captures this excitement perfectly in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and Reepicheep have gone as far as they can in their boat, they are seeing beyond the end of the world into Aslan's country and it is time for Reepicheep to paddle the rest of the voyage alone "Then he[Reepicheep] bade them good-bye, trying to be sad for their sakes; but he was quivering with happiness."

How I hope that we can all quiver in happiness.