MY "HEAVEN"...............

As many people commented in my last article, Heaven is envisioned and imagined by every person in a way that is either slightly or drastically different that how anynody else sees it. My personal idea of "Heaven" is radically different than what most people would say if you asked them about it. My own concept of Heaven is my own personal perspective and it is an image which gives me the most comfort and joy about what might happen when I leave this earth and go to be with God.

I don't really see Heaven as a place or a location. I don't see it as somewhere everybody walks around and talks to each other and lays on the grass and and smells flowers all the time. Like I said, my personal concept od "Heaven" is enormously different that anything that most of you have ever heard in church before (or anyplace else, for that matter).

Human language is a very limited and clumsy device with which to desrcibe the indescribable or explain the unexplainable. Therefore, my attempt to tell you all how I see Heaven will be the equivalent of playing the piano with oven mitts on both hands. There is no way I can fully put into accurate and fully discernable words what my mind imagines and what my "spirit" feels, but I will put the oven mitts on and try to play Mozart anyway.

My idea of "Heaven" is a sort of merging into God Himself. I see eternal life in "Heaven" as consisting of a total and utter assimilation of all that is left of me after death by God. All our lives, we as believers are taught to lose ourselves or die to ourselves, and increasingly take on the nature and mind of God. I personally believe this is in preparation for God to ultimately "absorb" us completely into Himself.

Because the greatest and, by far, the most lasting eternal joy and bliss that any of us can experience would not be to merely be "with" God, but be "in" God. At the "Last Supper", Christ described His relationship with the Father as being "in" the Father and the Father being "in" Him. Our relationship with Christ consists of being in Him and Him being in us.

I have heard an illustration used that describes believers as being "cells" that make up the "body of Christ." That in the same way different human cells make up our bodies and have different functions, so too different believers make up the body of Christ and have different functions. However, our main "function" is to exist and work solely for the sake of the body, just like our own cells do.

A cell in our body has no real identity, in and of itself. It is a tiny component that works with all the other billions of tiny components to make our bodies function and operate correctly. We as believers serve the same purpose in the body of Christ, or in the Kingdom of God, or however you want to say it. We are the "cells" that make up the body, but we are also the body itself.

I see "Heaven" as God's act of assimilating me into Himself eternally. I continue to be me, but at the same time, I cease to be me. I am in God and He is in me forever. I will eternally exist "in" God and He will eternally exist "in" me. And through this total assimilation, I can eternally experience all that God is; not just from a distance, but fully and completely for all time. He will have utterly "absorbed" me, as it were, into his very Being and I will at last truly be an actual part of Him and all that He is.

I can think of nothing else that can even come close to the kind of overwhelming happiness and complete fulfillment that this would mean. The "Heaven" that most people imagine utterly pales in comparison to the paradise of being one with God forever and ever. Words cannot describe the unimaginable ecstacy and rapture of sharing in all things with God. Not just observing it from a ways off, but knowing and experiencing it all from within God Himself.

What joy it will finally be to completely and totally let go of all that is "me" and be utterly taken over and apprehended by all that is God. I can think of no other "Heaven" any greater or more magnificent than that. And that is the "Heaven" that I am looking forward to and the one I long to dwell in forever. I think about that "Heaven" all the time and I can hardly wait to be "in" it.