Speaker: Bonnie Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Hard choice! The desire to break camp here and be with Christ is powerful. Some days I can think of nothing better.  But most days, because of what you are going through, I am sure that it’s better for me to stick it out here.  Philippians 1:23-24, The Message

My dad used to tell the story of an eight-year old boy with a troubled home life who wrote a letter to God, addressed it to heaven, put a stamp on it and mailed it.  As you probably know, letters without valid addresses on them would get sent to a dead letter office where they are usually disposed of; but, this letter was opened.  The message read, “Dear God, what is it like to die?  I just want to know.  I don’t want to do it.  Your friend, Michael.”

Yes, even years ago, this troubled cry was a commentary on the violence which makes life fragile and uncertain with drive-by shootings, gangs, and terrorism.  In desperate circumstances, life is cheap, causes some to want to live without thought for tomorrow, living for the moment because you never know what a day may hold, or else paralyzed by fear, wondering if someone’s bullet or IED has your name on it.

This is the world in which eight-year-olds ask the sobering question, “Dear God, what is it like to die?”  Yes, we know eight-year-olds should be thinking about life, not death, yet the reality is that both are part of life, and knowing that God sent His son to take away the fear of death, makes a big difference in how you live.

Because he knew that death is merely the transition into the presence of God for those who are His followers, Paul could cry out, “O Death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).   But anything that you have never experienced or don’t understand can be frightening—whether you are eight or eighty.

When Paul wrote his second letter to the Corinthians, he used the analogy of pitching a tent as you would do when you camp out–and he spoke from his own experience, because he was a tentmaker.

He says that our earthly tent, the body, wears out, beaten by wind and weather with seams torn which can no longer be repaired.  Then he says we will have one which is eternal, made by God Himself.  Here’s how he put it: “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands” (2 Corinthians 5:1).

In His last week with the disciples, Jesus said he was going to prepare a place for his followers (in His words) so that “you may be with me where I am.”  This, of course, personalizes heaven and makes it real—not simply a nebulous “out-there-somewhere-sort of thing.”  Heaven is a home, and for those who have been homeless, or who have wandered as a refugee, knowing that you are secure and will never lack is the best good news.

When I am going to some part of the world I have never seen before, I investigate to find out what it’s like.  I go online and when it’s possible, I’ll talk with someone first hand, someone who has been there and who can tell me what it’s like from personal experience.  No other book in all the world can tell me what the Bible does about heaven, and only one person has ever been there and come from there to tell us what it is like.  His name is Jesus Christ.

At the end of C. S. Lewis’s book, The Chronicles of Narnia, all the characters die in a train accident.  Lewis concludes, saying, “But the things that began to happen after that were so beautiful that I cannot write them.  And for us this is the end of all the stories, but for them it was only the beginning of the real story.”  And that is the truth and the real answer to little Michael’s question and perhaps yours, today.

Resource reading:  John 14:2-3