Sitting on Suitcases
For every significant event in our lives, there are the many, seemingly countless, insignificant moments that lead up to it.
The day of my wedding was, and forever shall be, one of the most important and beautiful days in my little vapor of a life. As a brief aside, I say “one of the most important and beautiful” because, while it remains the most beautiful day of my life thus far, I’d like to imagine that my wife and I have many more days of equal or greater beauty yet on the horizon, both here below and in the world to come.
As memorable as my wedding day was, the morning of was far from exciting. While my wife and her bridesmaids were getting dressed, stressed, and prepared for the day ahead since the early morning hours, I had what could be called a ‘normal’ start to my day. I woke up early, though not too early, had a coffee, spent some time in prayer and in God’s Word, and more or less followed my typical routine for a Saturday morning. My groomsmen were to arrive around mid-morning, at which point we’d all head out for breakfast only to return and get ready ourselves. Between waking up and their arrival, however, my time was my own.
While my morning was relatively ‘normal’, what I do recollect is that there was a peculiar stillness in the air; a stillness that seemed to swell within my own soul as well as in the rest of the house around me. An inexpressible, impalpable, elusive - and yet altogether weighty - sense of importance rested on me.
This was, after all, the morning of my wedding day. In only a few short hours, I would make a covenant with another soul, promising lifelong love and faithfulness to her for the rest of our days before our Creator and witnesses. This was the last morning in which I’d awake as a single man; the last time I’d be ‘on my own’ in the particular way that I had grown comfortable with all my life. It was a sobering thought, a weighty thought, but above all, it was a joyful thought.
Nonetheless, what struck me was the undeniable stillness and normality of the morning itself, contrasting mightily with the bustle, joy, and celebration that was to erupt in only a few hours’ time. I stood before a great divide, the Mariana Trench of milestones - marriage. Though I was unable to identify the sensation in the moment, I could feel the leaves of a new season in life beginning to circle around my feet all the same.
Though I moved into our apartment two months before my wife and I got married, it still felt relatively unlived in. My wife and I, with help from our parents, had been slowly furnishing the place and making it our own, but it still lacked one very important thing: her, my wife. While I was waiting for my groomsmen to arrive, I disassembled my bedroom set (as we were taking my wife’s), prepared some other pieces of furniture to be moved out by our family while we were away, and finished packing my suitcase for the honeymoon. When all was said and done, I vividly remember looking up across our new home, struck by the emptiness of it, then staring down at my suitcase, and simply sitting down. Everything that needed to be done was now done, there was nothing left to do but wait - and I couldn’t have been more excited to begin the next part of the journey.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Heaven lately. And whenever my thoughts begin dwelling on Heaven, a certain restlessness comes over me. A restlessness to get up and out, like on my wedding day, and begin the adventure. Life is so incredibly good; marriage to Elaina, my wife, even better, and the Lord, the Giver of all good things, infinitely better still. And yet, when my heart fastens tightly on thoughts about Heaven, thinking about seeing Christ face to face, anticipating being rid of every trace of sin, I get restless. It’s not so much that I want to leave this life and the good things in it, but rather that I want to scoop it all up and take it with me - take it home, take it to Him.
Not long after becoming a follower of Jesus, I found myself thinking more and more on the reality of my own death. Not in a morbid way, but in a Biblical way: “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). Like David, the song of my soul, still and strong, though perhaps quieted in seasons by the things of this life, yet never hushed entirely, has been simply this:
“One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in His temple” (Psalm 27:4).
To feast on the beauty of Jesus, to inquire about His temple and to rest among the folds of His robe, that is what we were made for - is it then any wonder that this life feels like a waiting of sorts? A sense in which we are all sitting on suitcases, everything having been done and prepared, waiting with excitement for the true adventure to finally begin?
I recently finished listening to Dr. John Neufeld’s series simply titled “Heaven” on Back to the Bible Canada. In ten short episodes, twenty or so minutes in length, Dr. Neufeld unfolds the Biblical vision of Heaven. Right in episode one, Neufeld does well to set a few matters straight.
Firstly, he makes clear that many, indeed most, firsthand accounts of Heaven are almost entirely fictitious. Whether these tales are from folks who claimed to have been there, only to return, or from others who ‘experienced a vision’, or both, the fact remains: many of these accounts are unbiblical, no matter how sincere. These ‘accounts’ make much of rolling hills like endless golf courses and paint pictures of excessive white - shining white people clad in bright white robes playing harps on white clouds. Where is the color in these visions? The creativity? The endless variety and beauty that God imbued this fallen world with seems to be missing entirely in these accounts. And above all, where is the glory of Christ in any of these visions of Heaven? If someone claims to have visited Heaven and yet their words about Christ are sparse or entirely nonexistent, then I assure you it was not Heaven they visited. Jesus is eternal life, and so no mention of Him in accounts of Heaven should make us take immediate pause - or cause us to run away altogether.
The second point that Dr. Neufeld stresses throughout the series is akin to the first. Namely, our notion of Heaven is not only weak, but it is unbiblical. Indeed, it is weak because it is unbiblical. Much of Western society’s thinking about not only Heaven, but life after death and bodily resurrection as well, are far more in line with ancient Greek, Hellenistic philosophy than Biblical truth. Indeed, these little pieces of philosophic leaven have leavened the lump of our thinking so thoroughly that we no longer recognize their influence. No doubt the primary reason so many Christians have a lackluster thought life about Heaven is owing to the fact that the place they are picturing is less of a place at all and more of an ethereal, disembodied ‘state of mind’ - a place that is utterly divorced from what the Bible says on the matter of Heaven. With such low thoughts on the Biblical Heaven, is it any wonder then that we so readily dig our heels into a world that was never meant to be our home? As C.S. Lewis once said,
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
In the series, Dr. Neufeld faithfully gathers the many threads spoken about Heaven in the Bible and weaves them into a refreshing, coherent whole. Are there gaps in the tapestry he weaves? Absolutely. Is he quick to admit when he simply does not have the answers? Absolutely. Neufeld is wise to speak little on those things that Scripture has also spoken little on rather than indulging in speculation. For, in the end, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that my mind has been turning to Heaven more often these days quite simply because I see Heaven more clearly now than I ever have before. I feel a renewed longing and excitement for our eternal home not only because of Dr. Neufeld’s careful teaching on the subject, but because of the Bible itself. I feel I can imagine and dwell confidently upon our eternal home with greater anticipation because of the very confidence I have in the Scriptures. And that is why I found this particular series so encouraging and refreshing. Indeed, there is a sense in which Dr. Neufeld says nothing new; he simply, as his program suggests, goes ‘Back to the Bible’.
So much of life is made up of waiting. Not just waiting, but a hopeful anticipation of something better. In fact, so often waiting actually deepens the joy of the thing we are in anticipation of. Waiting for the arrival of your wedding day, a newborn child, or perhaps a family vacation that you’ve been planning, all of these take time to arrive, and therein lies part of the sweetness - the very act of waiting. As the day draws nearer, the joy grows stronger. Thus we often hear the saying, “Life is a journey, not a destination”, and how true that is. If we don’t take time to enjoy the life God has given us, it will pass us by without a second thought.
However, therein lies the rub with much of waiting. While waiting may heighten the joy of the thing that you are waiting for, sometimes it actually overshadows the object, or destination, of your joy, resulting with you taking comfort in anticipation of the next thing just over the hill.
It is not so with Heaven.
Heaven is a real place, it is the destination. Indeed, it is both the destination and the journey, the never ending journey. Occupying ourselves for all eternity with the worship, exploration, and inquiry of our infinite Lord is the foundation upon which our eternal joy rests. In His unending perfection, there will always be another door beyond the next that can be opened, revealing greater splendor than what we had previously known, or even thought possible. In our marriage to Christ, we shall enter into a honeymoon phase that will never come to an end; rather, as the endless years of eternity roll, so too will our joy increase. While we may have great and exceedingly great joy in our anticipation of Heaven, rest assured that the reality will in no way fall short. God Himself, our eternal dwelling place, cannot fall short. As we sit on suitcases here below, awaiting that train that will take us home to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, allow yourself to wait with joy because, dear friend, the best is yet to come.
Photo by Peter Herrmann, Unsplash
