Vacation, Camp and Heaven

This is the time for the kids to go to camp and families to travel. It's a time for making memories and discovering new wonders about the world we live in or in the case of camp - new things about ourselves. One of the things that we all do before we send our precious child to camp or ourselves to another destination is preparation!

We would never dream of sending or going without researching the destination. After all we want to make sure that it is 1) worth our time and 2) that we derive the ultimate fulfillment from it.

When we learned of our Justin's relocation from this earth to heaven I remember wracking my brain trying to figure out what he was doing and what he knew and could see. I realized very quickly that while I thought I knew a lot about God's word I had never really studied up on heaven. Nor had I heard many sermons on heaven. And I realized that I had sent my child on ahead to a place I had not researched or truthfully even been too interested in.

Most of you could probably relate. After all - we trust God, right? We just believe that He's got it all under control and that heaven will be great. So why sweat the stuff we can't understand anyway? After all, the Bible says it's a mystery, right?

Wrong! The Bible is rich with examples and hidden treasures regarding heaven. In fact, C. S. Lewis says that it's only since men have quit thinking so much about heaven that they have become so earthly minded. We are told to "set our minds on things above where Christ sits." God's word says that "the spirit reveals" those things that are too wonderful for us to comprehend. We can know and are in fact, commanded to know.

It took my son's relocation for me to really sink my teeth into study about heaven. Thankfully there are some wonderful writers that have done a lot of the work for us - Randy Alcorn being one of the greatest of our day. I would encourage you to read his work. He has many excellent fictional novels that will pique your interest in reading his apologetic, Heaven.

Here are some of the benefits of learning so much about heaven: a lack of fear about dying, immense gratitude for the work that Christ accomplished on the cross, a sense of wonder at the hugeness of God's plan for redemption and a desire to live better, serve harder and love more deeply.

The desire and compulsion that many of us feel to investigate vacation or camp spots has to do with our excitement and interest in those places. Don't you think we should have that same excitement and interest in where we will spend eternity? Don't you think God deserves our - at the least - curiosity about the place He has prepared for His beloved children? I do. I am sorry it took Justin's moving there to motivate me but I am not sorry for the time I have invested in studying about heaven. I am like a kid on Christmas Eve. Living in the anticipation of what lies ahead. And knowing for once I will not be disappointed in the imagining! It will be better than any brochure, postcard or dreaming.

I can only imagine........