“Mummy, where is heaven?”
It’s the sort of question that no parent really wants to be asked just as they are getting their nearly-8-year-old settled for bed. So the parent deploys the tried and trusted response: “We’ll ask Papa to explain it tomorrow.”
But in truth it’s a perfectly good question, and one that I suspect many of us supposedly ‘grown-up’ Christians feel ill-equipped to answer. I recall a much-respected Christian leader, whom I knew and loved, suggesting that heaven was ‘up there in space, but just a very long way away’. We may instinctively feel that this may not be an entirely convincing answer, but I wonder how many of us could offer something more compelling and biblically persuasive.
So here’s what this particular ‘Papa’ said to the nearly-8-year-old, while sitting together on a grassy hill, looking out over clear water, breaking on an island beach:
“Remember how two days ago this island was completely covered in thick cloud; a kind of dense sea mist? It was impossible to see anything at all beyond a short distance around us. And then imagine if it was always like this. We would never know anything about the busy harbour, the colourful boats, the spectacular, surrounding islands or the beautiful, blue-green sea.
But then imagine that a breeze begins to clear the fog. The sun starts to break through, giving glimpses of a completely new ‘world out there’; a world that had been hidden, invisible to us.
It’s a bit like that when we think about earth and heaven. We think that what we can see with our eyes is all that there is. But it’s not true. It’s as if we are living under a murky, smothering fog, and we can only see the few, familiar things that surround us.
But if the cloud was blown away – and one day it will be – we would see the far bigger and far more beautiful world all around us; one that has always been there, but that we had never imagined. Heaven is a bit like that.”
I don’t know if my feeble attempt at an explanation was helpful to my curious questioner. I simply pray that it will at least have planted some seeds of imagination in a young mind; seeds that can grow to stimulate of a more real, more vital and more infectious hope of heaven.
For heaven is not “in a galaxy far, far away”. It is not some ethereal, ghostly half-life. Nor is it an infinitely extended version of the worship times we currently know.
It is, quite simply, “better by far” (Phil 1:23).
It is to have our current, ‘clouded vision’ swept away like evaporating mist, to reveal the stunning, incomparable beauty of the spiritual realm, ‘God’s space’, that coexists with this visible world and which is destined to be fully reintegrated with it.
When Jesus was ‘taken up’ into heaven “a cloud hid him” from the sight of his friends (Acts 1:9). Achingly it still does. But the day is approaching when the sun will break through, the wind will blow, and the obscuring cloud will be forever dispersed.
Maranatha. Come, King Jesus.
