Chapter One

Welcome to Paradise!

When you ask people what they think heaven will be like, most struggle to find a clear answer. Instead of giving you a definite response, they usually grope for various adjectives. These almost always include words like cloudy, hazy, white, and dreamlike. Sometimes people will tell you they picture heaven as being infused with "incredibly intense light." Whatever you imagine heaven to be, chances are that one of the first words that comes to your mind is spiritual.

When we do allow ourselves to describe heaven in a material way, we usually think of angels or saints walking around wearing long white robes and choirs singing in the background. The only activity we imagine these strange beings engaging in is never-ending worship of some invisible God, who is as cloudy, nebulous, and undefined as heaven itself.

And then we wonder why no one is excited about traveling to this place!

Well, the first thing to do before we begin our trip is to get the picture of robes and choirs out of our minds altogether. Many of us have such a monumental misconception about heaven that it severely limits our capacity to imagine it, much less look forward to it. The reason is partly that the entertainment industry has programmed us to picture heaven in a very cartoonish way, with clouds, harps, halos, and the like. The real culprits, however, have been poets. Down through the ages, poets have attempted to capture the joy, rapture, and happiness of heaven by giving us an abundance of "ethereal" images. These images, while designed to elevate our souls and show us a glimpse of the transcendent nature of heaven, often have the opposite eff