God’s love stirs my heart to care deeply about heaven—and yes, the thought of heaven energizes me to live in the current moment with deeper joy, as someone for whom the best is yet to come. The bottom line is this: God loves you, and He wants to share all eternity with you. Christ has gone to prepare a special and lovely place where you can come and live with Him forever.

A Place of Ultimate Residence

Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.

—JOHN 14:1–3

I read about a law firm that sent flowers to an associate in another city to celebrate the opening of its new offices. Through some mix-up, the card that accompanied the floral piece read “Deepest Sympathy.” When the florist was informed of his mistake, realizing two cards had been switched, he cried out, “Oh no! That means the card that went to the funeral home reads ‘Congratulations on your new location’!”

We can understand the florist’s embarrassment, but we would also like to think that the second card was not inappropriate. Congratulations are due to anyone who is en route to the place of one’s deepest joy. And yet we expend a great amount of prayer in holding people back from it. Of course we love them, and we don’t want to be parted in the interim. But how can we ever treat heaven as some kind of consolation prize for having to leave this present life?

I think the main reason we feel sorry for those who die—especially those who “die before their time”—is that we don’t have a strong concept of the solid reality of heaven. Charles F. Ball pointed out that some think of heaven as they do of Santa’s North Pole, or Peter Pan’s Never-Never Land. They speak with a nod and a wink, as if to say, “You and I both know that’s all fairy tale stuff. Thinking adults don’t believe it for a minute.”11

Then there are those who foresee heaven as something vague, puffy, dehumanized, and barely real. Others believe in a heaven that has no objective reality but is merely a state of consciousness.