The Heavenly Let-Down

So in the second service today we sang “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” I like the hymn, but it really hit me hard today.

“This robe of flesh I’ll drop and rise

To seize the everlasting prize

And shout while passing through the air,

Farewell, farewell sweet hour of prayer!”

Those lines put into form something I have been meditating on. Viewed from one angle, there is a “heavenly let-down.” That is, from the this-world perspective, heaven is a mixed bag. On the one hand, we’re out of the struggle of life, no more sorrow, suffering or death—the old order of things passes away. But then there is the part of us that thinks that heaven means a restoration of all things here, all the pleasant stuff we knew.

It’s the old joke. Two guys spent a long life loving baseball. They made a deal with each other that whoever died first would tell the other if there was baseball in heaven. So one of them dies. He comes to visit the other a few days later and his friend says, “Well?” The dead guy says, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is, there is baseball in heaven. The bad news is, you’re pitching tonight…”

I don’t think there is baseball in heaven. Soccer, probably. Much of what we know and value here is not there. That is, we tend to think of heaven as an expansion or perfection of all that is good here.

I am fumbling, so let me get to the example. I was looking at Melissa’s Bible, looking at a new but worn book, full of some bookmarks and notes here and there. I was thinking, boy she really would have enjoyed hanging out here and studying the Bible. But then I thought, “How foolish! What does she need with the written Word when she is in the presence of the eternally-living Word?” I mean, we really can’t comprehend it. We see only dimly thru the glass…

And then, those lines from the hymn—“farewell, farewell sweet hour of prayer.” Yikes. She loved her prayer time. She was fond of reminding me and I guess everyone that Susannah Wesley had 19 kids, 17 survived, and when she needed a break, she would sit down and place her apron over her head and the kids knew not to disturb her. Or she would recall how Ann Goolman would go sit on the rock by the barn and everyone knew to stay clear. Melissa made those times for herself, often telling me she needed it and that meant, “Keep the boys occupied.”

I was thinking as we sang, she loved her time of prayer, vaguely thinking, I bet she misses it. Will we really say “farewell” to something so dear and powerful as our hour of prayer? See, if you are tied to this world, even the righteous things of this world, heaven won’t seem like much. But if you recognize what Paul was trying to tell us in 1 Corinthians 13, you’ll be quivering until you get there: everything is going to pass away. Even the good things like prophecies and miracles. Gone. No more. No need. Because God’s love—His very presence is the order of the day, all day, forever.

In 1 Corinthians 15, the Bible teaches us that the resurrection body will be nothing like our present bodies. That is, the analogy is to a seed—the wheat plant looks nothing like a wheat seed. So the perishable thing—the seed that dies (see John 12)—is raised in imperishability, becoming whatever it was that planted it, a spiritual body totally unlike the seed. I am not sure what will be like it is here.

That gets me—even the righteous things of this world, the things that bring spiritual growth—we’ll say good-bye to, because we’ll be where we are supposed to be. At least that’s what strikes me today.