Will Heaven be Boring?

I’ve heard this question posed at many times and in many ways, from the last unit of a Harvard philosophy class to a friend telling me in seventh grade that she’d “rather go to hell, there’s more stuff to do there,” and everything in between. There are several comments I’d like to make about this question.

The Question

First, this is a very first world question. People whose main concern is boredom (I admit to occasionally being one of them) are generally those people who have forgotten how to be grateful for the basic things in life: food, shelter, safety, etc. But that does not mean we should push this matter aside; I think it actually leads to a very important point. We often worry about this question because we have forgotten what, in fact, the purpose of life is in the first place; we have forgotten what is truly valuable.

Chronic Illness and Long Division

Rather than try to argue this, I am going to present a couple of pictures:

First, I want you to picture me as a three-year-old. When I was younger, I had a great many health problems. I was in and out of the hospital with urinary tract infections, with high fevers, with asthma, and with constant allergies. It was an exhausting part of my daily routine; it never really went away.

Imagine you had offered me a miracle-drug that would make all this sickness go away. And supposing I replied, “No, thank you. What would I spend all my time and energy on if you did that?” In vain you would try to explain that the sickness was the very thing keeping me from using my time and energy as they were meant to be used; I had never known anything else.

Second, I want you to picture me as a fourth grader. It was in about fourth grade, as I recall, that I became well-acquainted with long division. I hated long division. Whenever you finished one problem on a practice sheet, there were thirty others waiting to be done.

Imagine you told me that, in ten years, I would be buying my own books on number theory and calculus because I find them fascinating; they open up an entirely new way of describing and understanding the world. And supposing I said, “No thank you. No more math. Who wants to go on doing more and more and more long division problems for years and years?” Without my understanding arithmetic, you could hardly explain calculus to me.

The Point

This world is cursed; a disease lies upon it, a disease of sin and death and decay. We have never known anything else, and so we cannot understand – at least without a lot of reconditioning – what it would be like to live without this. But that is not to say that there is nothing else out there.

We spend a great deal of energy nowadays putting out fires – that is, trying to cure our diseases, or trying to learn how to do long division correctly. But that is not what life is about. All of those things are simply obstacles that need to be removed so that we can start moving toward where we were really meant to go. The fact that one day there will be no more of the obstacles to clear does not mean we will have nothing worthwhile to do. It means we will finally be free to do what is worthwhile.

And what is worthwhile? I catch only glimpses of it on very good days – glimpses of what should be, of a world of awe and wonder that groans at its bondage. I have spoken a little of those glimpses here; I imagine I will speak more of them hereafter. For now, I will say this: we in the modern world too often mistake adrenalin and excitement for meaning and wonder. When we begin to recognize the latter, we will find that there is enough mysterious beauty in a single flower or sunset to fill a lifetime – and our God is making new ones every day.

Will Heaven be boring? Never! Heaven is the place where we finally get to set out, unburdened, on the great destiny we were made to fulfill.

“sunset” by BilalMgableh is licensed under PDM 3.0