Thoughts about Heaven

Warning.  This post might make you cry, especially if you click on the song links.  I have several links in this post, including a sermon, so if you really want to come with me on this journey, you will likely end up doing this post in parts.

I spend a lot of time thinking about heaven now.  It is the only thing that can give me comfort actually.  A few times now, I’ve gotten myself relaxed at night with a glass or two of wine and I turn on YouTube and search “ambient music with water.”  Eventually I find the one of several I like to look at and as I write this and find the link now during the day, I’ve finally saved it to my favorites.

Living in the technological age we live in now, where I believe it must be drone footage that filmed these wonderous scenes, I feel we do get a taste of heaven or what the new earth will be like. (More on than later in this essay). These are absolutely beautiful scenes, but apparently it will be so much prettier.  Even though the title of my substack is I Can’t Imagine, what I can imagine is Morgan flying through heaven, experiencing all of these wonderous sites she would have liked to see on Earth, feeling excited, happy, free, loved, and every good feeling imaginable.   We were a family who liked to travel and take fun vacations and see beautiful or interesting sites and we all would have loved any of these sites in person.

I’ve thought about heaven a decent amount over the years, especially when somebody I loved passed away, but also when I would get in one of my NDE phases or various other reasons.  I’m about halfway through the book “Imagine Heaven” I mentioned in another post, and it continues to intrigue me, give me hope, but also brings up those nagging questions about why those who did not claim to believe in Jesus or “give their life to Him” had NDE where HE was with them.  What does this mean?  Is it up to me to even figure it out? The author said in chapter 12, under the heading “Who Rules” that “Seeing is not believing.  Seeing God does not ensure the full trust or loving faithfulness to God.” He then mentioned an NDE of an atheist named A.J. Ayer whose memory was that of a painful red light and he wanted to extinguish it. The author then says, “God gives us freedom to choose him, or to rule our own lives without him.  Perhaps the loving light of the world is painful to those who reject him?”

On Friday, knowing I wanted to try to write this week’s post about this subject, I searched for “Sermons on Heaven” on YouTube for my daily walk.  You have to be careful when doing this.  I have learned quite a bit from listening to sermons while walking over the past several years, that there are Biblical preachers and there are those who are preaching from their own view and not a Biblical view.  In other words, they don’t apply scripture the way the writers, culture, and God intended at the time (in context), but apply it to what they want it to be about now - out of context I guess.  I knew which preachers that popped up first I should avoid.  These guys preach new age Jesus and that we can “all become like God” in some sense.  Who does that sound like?  They preach that having enough faith will give you anything your heart desires (prosperity Gospel).  These things are not Biblical.  God alone has the sovereign decisions and He is not our vending machine of desires.  He alone knows what is best, not only for us, but for all of mankind.  Nobody could ever tell me that the prayers I was praying in that waiting room with the hospital employee and the other visitor, the prayers of my husband when he heard what was going on, or the prayers of Rock 4 and her prayer partners on the morning Morgan passed when she took the very unexpected sudden turn for the worse, did not encompass enough deep faith enough for her to live.  I also wonder now if Morgan was seeing all of it happening as she hovered above the waiting room ceiling, like many NDE people say happens before they “return.”  No, I trust that God knew that Morgan’s purpose on Earth had been fulfilled, for whatever unknown reason to me.  I hate to say this, but Morgan had an inkling that she wasn’t going to live a long life.

She was attracted to drama, even though she would deny that about herself.  Have I mentioned before that she thought she’d be murdered some day?  I always just saw that as a reflection of the (bad) choices we made to watch so many episodes of Dateline NBC.  I hate that I did that with her now.  I wasn’t near as strong of a Christian and adhering to the Guidebook of Life as I should have been all those years we raised our kids.  I didn’t realize the world had changed so drastically and they were not getting the same input from society I had benefitted from. (Osmosis of the good moral culture we all lived in for the most part.)  The world was becoming much more complicated and I wish I’d only let her watch very positive movies or shows, even if she’d be upset to not get her way. Garbage in, garbage out.

The song I mentioned that we will be playing at her Celebration of Life was requested by my daughter to a friend of hers one day when she had that inkling she might die young.  She’d mentioned the song to me the first year she heard it, and I think she would have only been 12 or 13 then.

This next song was one of Morgan’s favorites.  I remember vividly driving with her to Plato’s Closet in Mason, OH and being at a busy intersection and she chose this song from her playlist and told me how much it spoke to her and how much she loved it.  I understood why she thought the lyrics had fit her life (in high school at that time) but it wasn’t until I was listening to it (with lyrics showing) yesterday morning that I saw this line:  “You’re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through.”  Did her spirit somehow know????

I feel like it did.  I may change my mind sometime about that, but right now while I’m writing this, I believe it.

Back to the sermon on heaven.  I came across this one:

It is EXACTLY what I wanted and needed to hear.  Enough of the Amazing Race at night.  I’m going to start reading a lot more C.S. Lewis. I’d read “Mere Christianity” in college and loved it.  At the time I had fallen in love with a cute boy who told me he was agnostic.  We’d spend hours out in the hall of our co-ed dorm talking about God.  I was never officially trying to convince him or anything. Due do Josh McDowell, a Christian apologist, coming to our campus and God’s calling on this young man, he did turn his life to Christ that year (at which point we read Mere Christianity together).  Many years later I read The Screwtape Letters and really loved that book.  I actually based my one and only Christian fiction novel, Broken Pottery, on the Screwtape Letters.  I wrote my book from probably 2007-2011 in bits and pieces, feeling called to do it and trying to work out my faith and the faith of others.  I’ve put a link for it here and made it free to download the next few days in case you’re interested.  (It’s only 99 cents regardless). It’s not a start and pick up later kind of book.  It’s best to read when you have time and can keep going for a week or so.

https://smile.amazon.com/Broken-Pottery-Joan-K-Smith-ebook/dp/B006ZT5HB2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YAH9KIZHDH90&keywords=broken+pottery+kindle&qid=1676235314&sprefix=broken+pottery+kindle%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-1

After all these years, I’m still contemplating and working out my faith and how to serve God with my best life, and now I am three-fourths of the way through another Christian fiction novel, this one geared toward junior high and early high school aged children, although it will be good for anybody.  My hope was to get it done in Q123 (as I made the title part of my work computer password changed in mid-December) but I’m guessing it will be Q2, and that’s just the very rough draft.  Some of what I had written is now going to change.

I’m also a bit mad at myself for being so lazy and procrastinating so much and for no good reason.  This book should be done by now and Morgan had wanted to be one of the pre-readers to tell me what needed work etc. I hope she has some influence up there somehow now to get me off my rear end and get it done. (joke)

Back to the sermon.  I listened to it for a second time while walking again this morning and stopped to take a few notes this time.  The book he mentions from C.S. Lewis at the beginning is called “The Problem of Pain” and he also mentions “A Grief Observed.”  I will read both of these and comment on them someday in the future.  I will look up Douglas Gresham and read some books by him.

So where Morgan and “all” people who have passed from this Earth are, is heaven - a different realm than here. One that is much better and entirely perplexing to us.  There must be souls in hell (separation from God by choice, too.) But one day many of us will be on the New Earth.  Having gone to church a lot in my life, that isn’t a subject that gets brought up very often at all.  Doesn’t it tie in nicely to the first video ambient music link I put in here today?  I cannot wait. I really am excited for when that day arrives.

In the new book I’m working on (fiction) some kids bring back the message that everything down here on Earth is about light and darkness.  All of our interactions we are both absorbing or casting out light and dark energy particles, and when they wear these special rings, they get to see it happening themselves. They learn how to read people and see that “looks can be deceiving.”  They are shown that is how we are seen from above.  It isn’t our physical traits that are seen at all, we are seen as swirling particles of light mixed with darkness and what we disperse to others (love) will have an effect on how close we are to God now, but also in eternity (what I will now call the New Earth).

I’ve kind of bared myself here today.  The real me.  I’m a deep thinker, always trying to figure out what THE TRUTH is.  I have plenty of good times where I’m involved in something and not thinking (or I guess I’d be crazy), but for many years now, I haven’t wanted much to do with our culture itself.   This is where I need to be, and I thank you a lot for coming on this journey with me.