Someday

A question came to me in the middle of this morning’s message about Heaven.

“How are we all going to be in heaven someday and not screw it up?”

Think about it.   In heaven, we will choose to worship God, among other things, while retaining our individual personalities, memories and free will.  But isn’t free will what got the world into this broken mess in the first place?  Does free will go away?  If not, what changes us there so deeply that all the friction of existence evaporates?

You might say, “Well, brother, the [...] of God changes us.”

OK. How?  Insert any attribute of God: Holiness, Presence, Glory, Worship, Love, Light, Fellowship, Forgiveness…Simply answering this way dodges the primary question.

Follow me on this for a minute.  We all have our quirks, tastes, likes and dislikes which are by-products of choice.  Some of us get along better with others, some like being alone.  Some readily give the benefit-of-the-doubt and others make errant snap-judgements.  Will we ever walk (float) away from a heavenly exchange thinking, “Wow.  What was up with that guy?”  If not, why not?

I think the reason we will all get along so well despite our individuality will be the shift in perspective we’ll gain from knowing God.  Paul wrote:

When the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end.

For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known.

I Corinthians 13:10 & 12, HCSB

Something about our interaction with God there – face-to-face – will give us a new vantage point: His.  I don’t know if we’ll have God’s insight into everyone else’s existence or just our own.  Maybe seeing ourselves from God’s perspective will be enough that we drop judgements and just love.  That seemed to be enough to get the Pharisees to drop their stones (John 8:2-11), cause a prostitute to wash Jesus’ feet with her hair (Luke 7:38-50) and move a dying criminal to faith (Luke 23:39-43).

Or maybe God will let us see what everyone else really experienced in this life.  What kind of relationships will we have there if we see and understand the brokenness of others?  What will it do to our ability to judge them?  Like Mack in The Shack:

Perspective strips us of our ability to judge and motivates us to love.

The last phrase I scribbled during this mental rabbit trail was, “Why not now?”  What if, in this life, we let God be the judge and we just love like He taught?