Thursday lunchtime (thinking about heaven)

Using my lunch break to do a bit of blogging; been doing a lot of thinking recently, much of which is related to therapy, so will not be in the public domain, but has brought me back to ideas about control and frustration, and what happens when the "real" world (the world-as-experienced) is different from SteveWorld™, where everything happens the way I want it to and everyone feels the way I think they should. Apart from my personal stuff, it did make me think about the way in which everyone, to some extent or another, has their own version of [Insert Name Here]World. We wouldn't feel disappointed or angry or frustrated or outraged unless the world-as-experienced was different from the world-as-we-think-it-ought-to-be. This isn't really news when we're thinking about this life; however, I think that there's a temptation to carry on doing it when we're thinking about heaven. Once we get beyond ideas about people in dresses sitting around on clouds, I think that there's a tendency to think about heaven as a place (/situation/experience) where we are happy and have our needs met and there's no more mourning or crying or pain; a place where life-as-experienced is exactly the same as life-as-we-think-it-should-be. Heaven gets sold as always doing the things you love best and feeling happy and never being bored. But I'm not too sure about this now. Jesus pretty much says that eternal life is exactly not all the best bits from this life, and there's lots of stuff in the gospels about treating other people in ways that might not make us happy, or about being prepared to give up everything. Maybe the joy of heaven is the joy of being with God, reunited in the one relationship that eternally tells us the uplifting truth of who we really are, recreated and renewed as we were intended to be made by the One who doesn't make mistakes; but maybe this means that the joy of heaven is joy for those who feel a reflection of that joy here in this life; heaven isn't eternal golf for fanatical golfers and eternal dancing for clubbers and eternal Sunday morning lie-ins for parents: heaven is being with God, and if being with God isn't your highest and greatest and best happiness here and now, then maybe heaven won't be for you.

OK, obviously need to do a lot more thinking about this, but I'm trying very hard to do work stuff during work time, and I've already exceeded my allotted lunch break so I'll have to stop.