“Will he go to heaven?” She looked me in the eye and asked me that question shortly after I arrived on scene. Thirty minutes earlier she found her 41-year-old husband unconscious and not breathing with a needle near his body. An apparent overdose. After seven years of being a thriving sober man he made a choice to use again. Tragically, he could not be revived. It is quite something for me to step into a scene such as this and be asked such a question, “Will he go to heaven?” Here I am face to face with a completely devastated wife wanting to know from me the answer to her husband’s eternal fate. I could discern that she was worried that his bad choice might condemn him to an unfortunate eternal fate.
How do you answer such a question? I suppose I could have gone down the evangelical checklist. “Well, ma’am let’s see. Has he accepted Jesus into his heart? Has he received the Holy Spirit? Exhibited the fruits of the Spirit? Did he attend church? Was he discipled or in a bible study? Was he in a small group? Did he tithe? Did he serve?” Perhaps some answers to those questions would have been helpful for me to render my judgement to the hopeful woman. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked that question.
Here I am in the context of our tangible three-dimensional world where we live our lives according to what we see, touch, hear and smell all that surrounds us and I’m supposed to know what exactly happened to the soul of this poor man who made a bad choice. I’ve learned over the years how much I haven’t learned and could never learn in this life. How “heaven” exists is a mystery and how and where a soul exists once it departs the body is mostly, if not all really, a mystery. But I do believe. I do believe the soul moves on. So, I feel I must answer this woman’s question and “I don’t know” might be the more correct answer but I acquiesce to a greater hope that lies within me and answer “yes.”
Perhaps the more accurate answer, which I believe is true, would be, “I believe he is with God.” You see, I’d like to think being with God at departure time is truer than anything else I might know about that moment of passing from this life to the next. How could he not be with God, no matter what? I’d like to believe, somewhat based on what I think I might know, that when this life ends, we would come to face to face with our Creator. How things go from there, who really knows for sure. Eternal bliss we hope. But like I always pray with people and did so on this night, I pray to a God who is all loving, all merciful, all kind and full of grace. Surely, this young man was with THAT God I know.
We really know little about “heaven” but what we know little of is contrasted by the historical reality of a resurrection, which undergirds the hope of heaven and stands up well under some pretty good evidence.
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