What They Don’t Tell You About Jesus

Granted, I’m still a fairly new Christian, all things considered. And I feel really blessed that the pastor that basically led my family and I to Christ was very balanced. He taught the word of God… the whole word of God. The hard teachings were being taught right alongside the easy-to-accept teachings. But as I watch more and more pastors, preachers, and missionaries, I begin to see something troubling. And a phone call I heard the other day to a local Christian call-in show really brought the concern home to me.

Forever Families

It’s a HUGE part of the success and retention of the LDS church. It’s a major part of the LDS temple services.

Forever Families.

Being a REALTOR, it takes me about two seconds to know when I’ve walked into an LDS home to show it for sale because there is always the tell-tale "Families Are Forever" cross-stitch on the wall. Sure, sometimes it’s a painting, poster, or wall-hanging… but the phrase is nearly always there. The LDS church, and therefore the majority of it’s members, believe that they have a corner on the market of forever families.

I remember thinking how sad it was that Christians don’t believe heaven is centered around a family structure surviving for the eternities together. I pictured a heaven like that as bumping into your earthly mate up there and not really feeling anything different for them than you would for anyone else. Marriage is just for this earth, and ceases to be important in the next life. That’s what I used to believe the Christian world taught. And, no doubt, you’ll be able to find that teaching in the Christian world somewhere. I’m constantly amazed at the diverging views and understanding of a group that can still somehow operate quite well as the Body of Christ, disagreements and all.

As I look at it now, it seems yet another way that the LDS church diminishes who God is, right along with God having once been a man, man’s ability to become a God, and the belief that Jesus couldn’t sacrifice for all sins we are capable of committing.

I know very little about what heaven will be like. But I know a lot (okay that’s relative… I know very little about anything, really) about who and what God is.

God is love. God is good. God is just.

That’s all I really need to know about God to, in turn, know enough about heaven. I can no longer imagine a God that would send us to a heaven where we are consumed with sadness because our relationships from earth no longer exist. That doesn’t make any sense on any level. It seems to me that God has one of two things in store for us concerning our relationships here.

Keep in mind, this is the ‘gospel according to me’ which is absolutely worthless as a source of truth.

OPTION ONE: God has something much more profound in store for us than this lowly earthly idea of marriage and family. If our bodies are to become glorified, it stands to reason that our relationships will also become glorified. I have a feeling that when we get to heaven, we’ll look back on our earthly families and be thankful that we don’t have to spend the eternities living on that level of relationship because God has shown us something incredibly more fulfilling and loving. It seems crazy to limit God to simply continuing on for eternity the same experience we’ve had here. If marriage and family don’t exist in heaven, it must be because some incredibly better form of relationship with our family members is waiting there for us.

OPTION TWO: The desire for family will be removed from us. I don’t like this option as well as option one, but I imagine it’s possible. If our earthly families don’t exist in heaven as they do here, then it means God has removed that desire from us. I can’t imagine how a heaven could feel like heaven without my family, but God can do anything. If His purpose for us is something other than family units in heaven then, when we get there, we’ll be fine with that. In fact, we’ll somehow be overjoyed with that. Heaven is heaven, after all. It will either be everything that we want it to be, or we will be changed so that it is everything that we will want it to be when we get there.

I guess I should include OPTION THREE: There is every possibility that we can have absolutely no concept of what heaven will be like while we are in our earthly state. We are talking about our eternal reward from a loving God here. If I were given a sneek peak into heaven, it occurs to me that it might seem so foreign and unreal to me that I wouldn’t have the capabilities to even comprehend what I was seeing.

I find great peace in the fact that I cannot understand what God has in store for me in heaven. I would hate to limit the experience to what my little brain can comprehend. It really is the ultimate Christmas present. We’ve all been staring at the box our whole lives, just imagining all the incredible things that could be inside. How wonderful that we can look forward to such a great gift and be assured that it will be exactly what we want, and yet really have no idea what’s inside it. I wouldn’t want to spoil this incredible Christmas present by knowing exactly what it was long before I got to open it.