What Heaven Looks Like
Let’s do an experiment. Okay, close your eyes… Wait, no. You’ll need your eyes open to read the prompts.
Starting over: Pretend your eyes are closed. Now, picture heaven. I don’t know your religion or spirituality, but I’m assuming you have some image in your mind’s eye of what heaven looks like. Keep imagining it, keep adding detail. Does it have sunlight, birds chirping? Are you in a forest, or in the countryside, or on a beach? What does the air smell like? What sounds do you hear? When you look in front of you, what are you seeing?
My image of heaven looks something like this:
I don’t know you, but I’m guessing your image looks similar to mine, or like this:
Or this:
What do all these images have in common?
They’re the natural world. Unspoiled.
My guess would be, if I asked a hundred people to picture heaven and tell me what it looks like, not one of them would describe tall buildings, honking cars, highways, hordes of people, or any type of industry. I don’t know, I haven’t asked a hundred people. It’s just a hunch.
Where I’m going with this is that what we picture as “heaven,” our reward if we are good enough people in life, is… our planet as it would be if we were proper stewards. So my question is – why wait until we’re dead to achieve this dream? Why not go for it right. freaking. now?
My husband and I occasionally talk about our retirement plans, and I usually come from the angle of: Why wait until we’re retired to live the life we want? How can we make that a reality now?
It’s the same with heaven, or should I say earth? Instead of dreaming about the day we will get our eternal reward and live forever in peace, never getting stuck in traffic, or having a bad view, or breathing polluted air, what can we do right now, today, to make that a reality?
We need to clean up our act, reduce our emissions, choose sustainamalism, and live with joy. If we do those things, and remember that, even if we have a thousand lives, the one we are living today is the one that matters, we can make a difference. We can make this planet a little more like heaven every day.