The Other Side

Man, you guys. The more I read what Jesus has to say about eternity, the more I'm convinced that it's just not going to be like we think it is. 

Actually, I wonder if we really think that's what it will be like or if that's just what we've been telling ourselves for so long because it sounds good to us. It sounds like what heaven should sound like. 

A group of Sadducees famously came to Jesus and asked about a little family problem they were having. The problem was this: 

A man married and didn't have any kids, then died. So his brother married his widow, but they didn't have any kids, either, and then he died. So a third brother stepped in and married the widow, and they didn't have any kids either, then he died. All told, there were seven brothers, one widow, and no kids. Now, they asked Him, when we all get to heaven, whose wife will she be? 

And Jesus said, "Don't you understand? In eternity, you won't be married like you are here." 

Fast forward two thousand years, and the prevailing message of heaven is that when we die, we will be swept up into this great big reunion of family and friends, everybody we've ever known just waiting for us on the other side, happy to see one another again and finally together. For all eternity. 

Can you almost hear Jesus saying...don't you understand?

It's a comforting thought. At least, it's comforting here for human grief. This isn't goodbye, we say; it's see you later. This isn't the end; there's a new beginning coming. All the folks that we loved spending time with here will be waiting to spend time with us again and this time, it will never end. They go on living, we go on living, and then for eternity, we all go on living together and it's the greatest thing we can possibly imagine. 

There are a few problems with this. 

First, it implies that our loved ones live in heaven with one eye toward earth. If that's the case, then Jesus isn't the most wonderful thing in heaven. Being in the presence of God isn't the greatest gift of all eternity. They're just in eternity partying it up and hanging out and looking at the door, waiting for when we will walk through it and join them. 

Friend, I cannot say this plainly enough, although I hope I am also being somewhat gentle (maybe): Heaven isn't about you. There's absolutely nobody in heaven who is waiting specifically for you to get there because you're somehow going to make eternity better. 

Second, though, it's just not what Jesus says. Jesus says when we are swept up into eternity, we don't have the relationships that we had down here. And it's not just in this question with the Sadducees. At another point in His ministry, He says that anyone who has given up mother or brothers or sisters here will be given back even more than they have lost. 

Not "you will get more time with your mother when you're with Me." Not "your brothers will be waiting to reconnect with you." Just...you will get back even more than you have lost. 

Which means, I think, that eternity is full of mothers and brothers and sisters. 

Listen, I'm not out here trying to ruin eternity for you. I'm not trying to tell you that the end of this life is the end of those relationships. I'm just trying to say...that's a really small picture of heaven. That's a really small anticipation of eternity. 

The vision that Jesus gives us for what's actually going to happen is much greater. And, I think, even more beautiful. 

(Stay tuned.) 

Good Grief

As I write about healing and wholeness and heaven and eternity, I have to confess that the last week has cycled back to me a season of grief that still feels so fresh. It was about a year ago that I lost a soul so close to my own, a companion whose impact on my life can never be replaced. A faithful friend for whom I am still so thankful to God. 

It was about a year ago that Sister Mary Thunder, my beloved husky mix, died. Somewhat suddenly. Somewhat unexpectedly. 

I have relived her life over the past year, looking at my social media memories every single day. Seeing all the fun we had together over nearly twelve years of life. Seeing her final months, then her final days, and remembering them as if they were yesterday. 

One of the things that I find myself tempted to do is to excuse it all. To say that she was suffering for awhile, that I missed it. That it was so incremental over our days together that I didn't even notice it at the time. 

I remind myself that she was epileptic for most of her life, suffering from seizures and from some kind of neurological pathology that we never did quite put our fingers on. In fact, the vet told me that the night before she died, she'd had nystagmus - an involuntary movement of the eyes due to some kind of misfiring in the brain. 

I remind myself that she had been diabetic for more than a year, diagnosed for almost a full year, at that point. That we had struggled to find the balance between good, nutritious food in sufficient amounts, starving a little too much, and balancing a blood sugar that was stubborn (and that is putting it mildly). 

I remind myself that she had been blind for about seven months. I remember the day she lost the last little bit of her vision, how she cowered in the corner, trembling with fear. How I had to take a day off work to stay with her, to make her get up and walk again, to assure her that I was going to be right beside her and not let anything bad happen to her. To help her get her confidence back. 

I remind myself that she couldn't play frisbee any more. That she struggled to run. That she was lost all the time. That she was never quite sure where she was. That the only thing she still knew was...me. 

And it's easy to remind myself of these things and to think, it was time. She had a good life, but it was time. And maybe it was past time. Maybe I made her live longer than she really should, just because I wasn't willing to accept her quality of life. 

But then...

But then, I remember that my epileptic dog died without having a single seizure in more than three years. That my diabetic dog died with perfect blood sugars. Actually, all of her lab work was absolutely perfect. That my blind girl, when she came out to see me for that last time, knew what "careful" meant and stopped just before she ran into the wall, course-corrected, and came happily toward my voice, wagging her entire husky butt with excitement the whole time. That she had learned to jump on the bed again and spent most of her nights cuddled right up against me. 

That for all of the struggles she had, she was, still, living a good life. 

And that makes it so much harder. So much more unfair. So much more agonizing in my heart. She wasn't perfect, but she had a good life. And then, she was gone. Just like that. 

I think it's so tempting for us to want to make excuses for death. It makes us feel better about it somehow, like it was time. Or it was merciful. Or it was somehow even good...somehow. Like we shouldn't be as sad about it as we are. Sometimes, we even convince ourselves that death is a grace. 

And sometimes, it is. 

But I don't think that's the case as often as we want it to be. Sometimes, it's just tragic. Sometimes, it's fighting through a whole broken life and somehow still not having enough to overcome it. Sometimes, it's the promise of "many more years together" cut short by a sudden drop in blood pressure and...a stroke? We aren't really sure. 

Hear me on this: that's okay, too. It's okay for it to hurt. It's okay for grief to be hard. It's okay for it to be unfair. For it to have been too soon. For it to truly have not been time. It's okay to cry - even a year later when you write a stupid reflection about it - because it doesn't seem right. It's okay to grieve because you did everything right and it doesn't seem to matter. 

It's okay to feel that deep hurt of loss and to not make excuses for it. To not try to make yourself feel better. Because you know what? Maybe it just sucks. 

And maybe the only comfort you get is that you gave her a good life. Right up to the very end, despite all her challenges, despite the things you never knew and struggled to control and were never sure you were getting quite right, maybe your best friend died almost perfect. 

And even though that feels painfully unfair, maybe in some way, it's a comfort, too. I did good by her. For as good as she was to me, for all the joy and wonder and strength and encouragement and goodness that she brought into my life, I did good by her, too. In the end, I couldn't save her, but she had a good life up to her very last days. 

Some days, that feels like something, too.  

Made Whole

So we're back where we started, with a seemingly-important question: will you be healed in heaven? 

Jesus says it's better for you to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye than to be thrown with your whole body into hell, and He says this while He holds out His own nail-scarred hands. 

And yet, there's something inside of us - something inside even me - that wants to believe that the burdens of this earthly life won't be forever. There's something inside me that wants to be healed. That wants to be whole. That wants to know what I'm like when I'm not held back by a body that is weaker than I want it to be. 

There's something in us that wants to see the lame man walk. That wants to see the weak child thriving. That wants to see the blind man looking around in wonder. That wants things to be very good again...because they don't feel very good right now. 

I don't have the answer. I don't know what God's really going to do with this. But I have two possibilities that roll around in my heart. 

First, maybe God just makes all things new. Maybe He just heals everything and you finally get the body you want and the freedom of movement and the strength of stature and the stamina and the wholeness that you seek. Maybe there's a distinction between the Kingdom we're living in now and the eternity that's coming and we can live in the Kingdom with one eye, but in eternity, we'll have two again. 

Maybe the promise of heaven is everything we dream it will be, everything we want it to be, everything our hearts yearn for when we think it has to be that way. 

Second, though, maybe wholeness isn't physical. Maybe the knocked-down, dragged-out, scarred-up body that we come crawling into eternity with doesn't matter as much as we think it does. Maybe we get to eternity and we don't get out hand back and we only have half our vision and we can look down and see the scars of our sojourn on earth and...we still feel whole. 

Maybe we just don't notice our limitations any more. Maybe we don't feel restricted by it. Maybe it just is what it is, but we are fully capable, fully well, fully whole anyway. Maybe we're able to do all the things we want to do through some process that we don't understand from our position on earth, but it makes perfect sense from God's perspective. 

One of the things that I've learned in a lifetime in my own broken flesh is that it doesn't always matter what the paper says; it matters how my body feels, how it moves, how it's functioning. In fact, a lot of the time, you'd look at the documentation and wonder how, exactly, I live the way that I do. I've met many other patients over the course of my life who can say the same. 

So maybe eternity is like that a little bit. Maybe it doesn't matter what the body looks like...maybe it just works. 

And maybe you look down and see the scars of a life as well-lived as you could have, knowing what you saved yourself from when you cut off that hand, making it all out through the one good eye you have left, and you're just filled with thankfulness for the goodness of God...for the grace that brought you this far. 

For the love that brought you home.  

Marred By Sin

If it's possible that Jesus was talking just about the way that we live in the Kingdom on this side of eternity when He told us to cut off our sinful hand and gouge out our sinful eye, then we have to understand something very important about this:

We will be judged for it. 

It's actually quite interesting if you pay attention to it. Follow me here. 

In the culture in which Jesus was talking, indeed all the way back through the old covenant, a deformed offering was no offering at all. You couldn't bring an animal with a blemish to God. 

That's how so many folks who were labeled "unclean" ended up being cast out of the Temple...and of the community in general. If you were deformed in any way, you were unacceptable to God.

It's also, somewhat, related to how we got the idea that a deformation or disability or illness was a mark of personal sin. Remember the man born blind? Everyone wanted to know: who sinned? Every time Jesus meets someone who is imperfect in their body, His first words are, your sins are forgiven. Why? Because it was believed that sin was the great deformer. 

Now, here He is saying that if you're sinful, might as well deform yourself. It is better to be deformed if it helps you to overcome your sin than to be whole and living a lie to yourself. 

But...if you cut off your hand, other folks are going to know. If you gouge out your eye, everyone else is bound to see it. 

Take care of your sin, and you'll be walking around as a marked man. In attempting to rid yourself of the offense, you'll actually make yourself untouchable. You'll put a mark on you. The world is going to look at you and tell you that you're not acceptable to God. 

Even if, in cutting off your hand, you have made yourself more acceptable to Him. 

This is important because Jesus is doing a couple of things here. 

First, Jesus is giving you permission to ruin your own life for the sake of it. He's giving you permission to step into something that looks unclean for the sake of being cleaner. He's telling you how extreme an action it is to address your sin, to take it seriously, and to do something about it. He's telling you that you're going to be marked...and then telling you you're going to be better of for it. 

Second, Jesus is saying something about everyone who was thought to be unclean. He's speaking to the ones who were ready to judge them for it. He was saying, in essence, "Maybe you see a man with one hand and you think less of him. But maybe he's doing the greater thing. So mind your business." Because you never know if the crippled man might actually be more holy than you think you are. 

Third, Jesus is saying something about the sacrifice in general. He's saying, now, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to come from the right heart. Which, honestly, was the point all along. God never said that He wouldn't accept a deformed sacrifice because He doesn't like deformed things; God didn't want a deformed sacrifice because He didn't want the people offering only their rejects - their unprofitable, unfit, weak animals to Him. He didn't want them to think that sacrificing to Him was as easy as getting rid of the things they wanted to get rid of anyway, the things that weren't going to pay off for them. But now, what Jesus is saying is that if your sacrifice is made in the right heart, in an effort to get closer to God and to do the right thing with your life, then it's okay to be a little deformed. 

I love all of this. 

And it still leaves us some room to talk about what we started with, which is this: what happens to your hand when you come into eternity? 

The Kingdom

Of course, it's not that simple. Will God heal us in heaven? 

We can't really know. 

We know Jesus is in the business of healing. We know He defeats death. We know He forgives sin. So if your hand causes you to sin and you cut it off to keep from condemning your whole body to Hell, can't God restore that sinful part of you through forgiveness and redeem it? 

Nothing will be broken in heaven...or will it?

One of the things we have to answer first before we can even really look at this question is...what, exactly, is the Kingdom?

For most of us, we have been taught that the Kingdom is the coming eternity with God. It's the after-life. It's what we do when we are beyond this curse-bound place and redeemed. 

But ah, there it is - redeemed. If you are waiting for heaven to be redeemed, then, my friend, I have to ask you what you believe God is doing in your life now. Are you not already being redeemed? 

Are you not already different in your heart than you were before you followed Jesus? Are you not already different in your approach to life than you were before you knew you were created in His image? Are you not already better, across so many facets of your life, than you were when you first met Him? 

Friend, are you not already being redeemed? 

And if you are being redeemed, then what exactly are you waiting on eternity for? The fullness of your redemption, yes, but only maybe? 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And He declared they were good. And the more He filled the earth, the more He declared that it was good. Until He got all the way down to human beings, to you and to me, and He declared it was "very good." There's no account in Genesis of the development of the heavens; only of the earth. And it was "very good." 

And the New Testament is full of "one another"s. Of the way that we are supposed to live here, side by side and hand in hand and heart in heart. The grand vision that God has for us is the life we live together in His name. 

And even Jesus Himself says the Kingdom has come. Indeed, it is already here. 

So if it's better for you to be Kingdom-ward with one hand than to have two and miss it all entirely, be thrown into Hell in a separation of yourself from God....that doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about eternity. We could just as well be talking about the here and now - about a life separated from God versus one that is lived in the Kingdom...in loving and honoring and one anothering the way that God designed us to do so. If your hand is keeping you from living the life God has for you right now, cut it off. It's better to be without it. 

But then...