Heaven Is Our Common Home

Excerpt taken from Grief Redeemed by Stephen Silver

 

Lesson Two
Heaven Is Our Common Home

On the six-month anniversary of Sandy’s death, after being in the final earthly home we owned together for only a year, I decided it was time to sell the house and I wrote this to our children:

While the last year here was brief, in certain ways it was one of the most special. Perhaps it’s because on some level we knew it would be our goodbye home—the culmination of twelve moves from Edinburgh to Bethel. These homes were where we started and built our life and family together. We finished in Naples on 12/21/21, but still have a final home in heaven to inhabit together. She has just gone ahead of me by a few years. Home was wherever Sandy was. The location didn’t matter to me as long as she was there. She always made me feel safe, loved, appreciated, and cherished. She was the ultimate homemaker.

Life with Sandy, imbued with the love of Christ which spilled over to our family and close friendships, had become my center of gravity. I was comfortable, happy, at peace, and blessed. I knew that and was very thankful for the life we were living together. Sandy was too. We would regularly weigh-in about how blessed our lives were. We were content to enjoy our golden years until one of us would eventually leave—a thought that rarely entered our minds since we were both in good health, functioning on most cylinders, and chose to avoid that subject.

I used to jokingly say that we would go together—not by a traumatic incident but by passing away together in our sleep. Perhaps that’s because the alternative of one being left alone without the other was too unthinkable.

I admit that I didn’t think much about heaven before Sandy relocated there.

Her death changed everything.

It changed my paradigm about the tenuousness and relative brevity of life here. It changed my desire for many more years here. And it changed how I intend to spend my remaining time.

Home is wherever Sandy is—and her home is now in heaven. From the moment she arrived there, I became laser beam–focused on learning all I could about her new address. I wanted, with any credible resources available and as much as humanly possible, to be able to envision her new life there. That’s because I wasn’t ready to be separated from “home.” I had (and still have) a thousand questions, most of which won’t be fully answered until I get there. To name just a few:

How is she spending her time?

Who is she visiting with?

Is she still the voracious knowledge seeker and disseminator she was here?

Has she gotten answers to her questions?

Is she able to share knowledge, something she loved to do?

Does she still look like Sandy?

Does she think about and miss us in ways similar to how we remember, think about, and miss her?

What will our reunion be like when it’s my time to leave for heaven?

If there’s no longer marriage in heaven, what form will the love and union we built here take on?

How will our relationship change?

Will it be as unique and special as it was here?

Pondering questions like these about my future home and her current one help me stay connected to her. They seem to bridge the gap between us and alleviate the severity of missing her. I think that’s “admissible” in a healthy grieving process. If these were to over occupy my daily thoughts, if I were to attempt ways of trying to communicate with her or adopt non-biblically supported answers—that would become unhealthy. However, knowing that heaven is our final common home, and that she simply got there a few years before me, it seems natural and fitting to explore that territory with Sandy in mind.

I have used several biblically based resources to assist me in this exploration. These include Randy Alcorn’s Heaven, Dr. David Jeremiah’s Answers to Your Questions about Heaven, Dr. Robert Jeffress’s A Place Called Heaven, and Richard Baxter’s classic The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (written in 1650). I’m sure there are others that I will read at some point, but these have given me a good perspective and meet my needs for the time being, and I would recommend them to you as well.

When I looked at Randy Alcorn’s table of contents in his masterful book Heaven, I immediately honed in on “Chapter 35: Will There Be Marriage, Families, and Friendships?” I decided to start there. Here’s part of what Randy says about marriage in heaven:

Here on earth we long for perfect marriage. That’s exactly what we’ll have—a perfect marriage with Christ. My wife, Nanci, is my best friend and my closest sister in Christ. Will we become more distant in the new world? Of course not—we’ll become closer, I’m convinced. The God who said “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18) is the giver and blesser of our relationships. Life on this earth matters. What we do here touches strings that reverberate for all eternity. Nothing will take away the fact that Nanci and I are marriage partners here and that we invest so much of our lives in each other, serving Christ together. I fully expect no one besides God will understand me better on the New Earth [heaven], and there’s nobody whose company I’ll seek and enjoy more than Nanci’s.

The joys of marriage will be far greater because of the character and love of our bridegroom. I rejoice for Nanci and me that we’ll both be married to the most wonderful person in the universe. He’s already the one we love most—there’s no competition. On Earth, the closer we draw to him, the closer we draw to each other. Surely the same will be true in Heaven. What an honor it will be to always know that God chose us for each other on this old Earth so that we might have a foretaste of life with him on the New Earth. People with good marriages are each other’s best friends. There’s no reason to believe they won’t still be best friends in Heaven.

When I read this, I took it to the bank. It made total sense and didn’t seem to conflict with Scripture. For me, it has become a level-set on how to think about my relationship with Sandy in heaven. Since her absence from me here has been so surreal, I had to grasp the reality of my future with her there, and this is a plausible and biblically supportable one—so it’s good enough for me.

I have to admit that, unlike the case with Randy, I cannot honestly say that I loved the Lord more than Sandy when she was alive—that there was “no competition.” In fact, there was with me. I know there wasn’t for her. He was her first love, more than me or our children and grandchildren. I knew and loved that about her, and never considered competing with Him for her love and devotion. I knew that the closer she was to Him, the more she would love me and the more fulfilled I’d be because of that. In hindsight, I believe I experienced Christ’s love so much through her that I wasn’t compelled to pursue a closer relationship with Him apart from her.

This has no longer been the case since her passing into heaven. I now come before and look mainly to Him for comfort, consolation, wisdom, and guidance—something I regularly did with Sandy. I jokingly (yet honestly) say that Sandy is the first person I’ll want to see when I get to heaven. But I believe, based on my current trajectory of intimacy with the Lord, that He will be the first person I want to see when I finally get there—at least I hope so.

Nanci Alcorn passed away on March 28, 2022 (eighteen years after Randy published Heaven) following a long battle with colon cancer. Upon her passing Randy wrote:

Nanci is with Jesus. So happy for her. Sad for us. But the happiness triumphs over the sadness. Grieving is ahead, and it will be hard, but these last years and especially this last month have given us a head start on the grieving process. I am so proud of my wife for her dependence on Jesus and her absolute trust in the sovereign plan and love of God.

I’m certain Randy’s priorities with Jesus were well in order before Nanci’s passing into heaven, and I look forward to hearing from him about how he’s handling their temporary separation.

In his book, A Place Called Heaven, Dr. Robert Jeffress says:

Heaven is the promise that God will eventually make all things right and that He will one day fulfill our deepest longings. Although God’s promise is yet future, it should make a tremendous difference in our lives today. As Alcorn explained, “If we grasp it, [heaven] will shift our center of gravity and radically change our perspective on life.”

Thoughts about and the pursuit of heaven, even if instigated by Sandy’s going there, have changed my “center of gravity.” It has shifted from Sandy to striving toward the goal and prize of my heavenly home. In short, I have become heavenly minded—and that is a good thing. It took the reality of living out the rest of my life here without her to look upon every day as one closer to reaching heaven in a way that will be pleasing to the Lord. Saint Paul had this perspective, which I always loved but have now come to understand on a more personal level:

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:10–14)

If it sounds as if my newfound focus on heaven is motivated by attempts to apprehend Sandy’s life there, and take comfort in my eventual reunion with her, well—it is. I understand that this is not the primary mindset I should ultimately have about heaven and am certain I will mature beyond this over time, but I also know that God knows the truth about where I am and where I am going and will continue to lead me down the path into His arms.

I have found this to be helpful on the path of grief. When I become acutely aware of her absence from me, and the waves of pain roll in, I fix my mind on the joyful existence she is now living and my tears of sadness become commingled with tears of joy—joy for the eternal life she has inherited, for the one I’m headed toward, and for the hope and promise of a purposeful finishing chapter here.

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