A Week in Heaven: Letting my Imagination Run Wild

Today I explore some other ideas regarding heaven, and this is a bit of a doozy...

Okay folks, here it goes. I am going crazy now. If you have been tracking with me throughout the week, this will likely be the day when you say, "Okay, he is a loon. His conjecture before was fun, but this crosses a line into insanity." As is my custom, let me give you yet another disclaimer. These are ideas, nothing more. They are not even beliefs. I am not saying below, "I think heaven will be like X". I know I did that here, here, and kind of here, but I am not doing that today. Today, I am just having a little bit of writer's brainstorming and asking the question "is it possible?" Not "likely", not even "based in an obscure Scripture reference". Today, I am simply pitching ideas that have arisen in conversation and been food for thought, and I felt them worth sharing. So, please read them with a grain of salt.

1) We are not alone.  I know that I am about to leave church tradition here, but I am going to propose something both wild and yet, not so wild at all. What if, over the course of the entire universe, God, in his infinitude and majesty, is replaying the entire passion history over and over and over across countless worlds, with countless peoples, all in the same natural universe, all with the same problems, all with the same sin and need for redemption. And what if those worlds will never meet in this present existence but will all culminate into an even larger intergalactic family of Christ when all was said and done. What if the "little green men" were all endowed with the reasoning and understanding capacities of God's image, and all peoples were together in one accord before his throne? Sounds like some kind of party to me.

2) Amends will be made within the family of God. I know that once we get to heaven, we will not harbor the wrongs done to us on earth, and we may not even remember the wrongs we did others. However, a certain beauty exists in the transaction of reconciliation; and let's be fair, many of us will leave earth with unresolved hurts--done to us and done by us. What if an aspect of eternal love, worship, and unity involves the reuniting of brothers and sisters of the faith who have hurt one another but never made amends on earth? What if, in heaven, they have the opportunity to assure each of their longstanding forgiveness and love? I would cherish the opportunity to reconnect with those who have hurt me but who I cannot find on this side of things, affirm that I have forgiven them, and assure them of my joy over seeing them. Likewise, I think of those who I wounded but with whom I have lost contact, and our need for reconciliation. I imagine our sitting together on a porch overlooking fields of grain, drinking a beverage so good it could not exist in the fallen world, and our conversing about our lives in light of truth. Strange thing, I think we will have this eternal love for each regardless, but something about the acts of forgiving and being forgiven seems like something we could do up there.

3) The cherubim and seraphim were just the beginning. At various points in the Scripture, individuals have had visions before God's throne, and they have seen things there that sound confusing but also awesome. I wonder if there will be even greater, more unique creatures than these. Anyone who knows me knows I love mythical creatures like the unicorn, the pegasus, and of course the griffon (my number one draft pick for greatest composite creature, ever), but I wonder if heaven will offer us creatures that we never could have imagined here on earth.

How bout you? Any crazy ideas you've had about The Great Destination?