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I soon realized that even with these measures, there were other contingencies for which I couldn't prepare. What if I happened to be taking a shower when the Rapture came? I could wear a bathing suit in the shower, but Jesus might come in that moment before I put my bathing suit on. The Bible said that those who would be taken in the Rapture would go up in the twinkling of an eye. I didn't think I could change that fast, and I wasn't sure Jesus would wait.

I knew that I was supposed to look forward to Jesus' return. But I wasn't sure I wanted him to come too quickly. I was barely out of high school and had yet to experience most of life. There were still a few things I wanted to try before leaving earth behind. As far as I could tell, God had eliminated some of the most exciting aspects of earthly life from eternity. For example, I had read that there would be no marriage in heaven and, I assumed, no sex either.

I discovered that I was not the only one who was concerned about this. With the look of a man who has been invited to a dull party and cannot decline, my best friend confided that he was worried about heaven. "I know we're supposed to look forward to being in heaven," he explained. "But when I read the Book of Revelation, it looks like all we will be doing is bowing up and down."

"Up and down," he repeated in a note of despair. "Up and down, for all eternity!"

I tried to reassure him that eternity would be more interesting than that, but I shared his reservations. It made me nervous when the pastor grumbled about people who found church boring. He wondered aloud what they thought we would be doing for all eternity. Would there be enough to hold my interest for that long?

Meanwhile joy, like the Day of the Lord, had a habit of showing up unexpectedly, as if it were a thief intent on catching me unaware. It stole upon me at inexplicable and inopportune moments, while driving in the car or making the bed, only to vanish as soon as I became aware of its presence. When I looked for it on my own, particularly in church, it eluded me. I came to understand that this is often the way of joy. A glimpse of heaven refracted through the shadows of earthly experience, joy prefers to inhabit the periphery of our spiritual vision.

My anxiety about heaven diminished as I continued to read the Bible. I began to understand that the images the Scriptures used of heaven were intentionally earthly, employing the language of the ordinary to describe the eternal. The angelic beings that surround the throne of God combine elements that are common to earthly creatures, making them terrifying in their familiarity (Rev. 4:7; cf. Ezek. 1:10). The architecture of heaven, according to Scripture, is rife with beautiful gems and precious metals (Rev. 21:18-21).

C. S. Lewis explains the necessity for this language: "Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience." Earthly experience is the only experience we know and must be our starting point when speaking of heaven.

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September 2005, Vol. 49, No. 9