Tonight, once you go to bed, before you fall asleep, and it is dark and quiet and there are no distractions, think about the fact that one day you will die. Think about what death would seem to be. Like looking at the sun, you won't be able to do it long.
Death would seem to be the end, the absolute end of me forever. If we can find the courage to face it for more than a few seconds, what we will feel is more terrible than we can possibly put into words. From deep within us a voice will cry out: "No!" "This cannot be!" "There must be more to life than this!" This voice tells the truth.
After all, made to want life so deeply as we do, if we were made for death, the God who made us would be cruel, something we cannot imagine God to be. Therefore, made to want life so deeply as we do, we know that we were made for life, eternal life.
Of course, not just life, we want everything. We want every good thing we see. This is not so childish as it may seem. After all, we were made to share God's life, and God is the source of everything that is good. For this reason, to see something good is to get more information about the life that we are going to have.
Therefore, to get our best glimpse of heaven, we do best to imagine life if it were perfect-if it were all we could imagine life to be. Here we are talking not merely about life in a world where everything runs smoothly. The greatest life I can imagine is the greatest life I can imagine me having-if anything were possible. But, as we do this, we need to remember that what we are imagining is but a glimpse of what is coming. It is only the tip of the iceberg.
As big as an iceberg may look, what we see is only its tip. Most of the iceberg is under water. We see the same sort of thing when we put a ice cube in a glass of water. Most of the cube is in the water. Only the top rises above the water.
Our attempts to imagine heaven can be viewed in much the same way. As we imagine the greatest life we can, what we are imagining is only the tip of the iceberg of what is coming. It is going to be all we can imagine and more.