Love and Death

A lot of books have been written about heaven. My favorite is A Travel Guide to Heaven, by Anthony DeStefano. The author speculates that God doesn’t create good things only to watch them die, so we will likely always have Paris. In other books, authors report actual experience. They have made a round trip, died and gone to heaven and come back to life. Ninety Minutes in Heaven, by Don Piper and Cecil Murphey, Flight to Heaven, by Dale Black, Return from Tomorrow by George G. Ritchie are among them.
I’m wondering why all these books are written by men. Do women not experience heavenly fly-bys? The men all express regret at having to return to earth; are women better at talking their way in?
There is surprising harmony among the accounts I’ve read. That God is light and love seems literal. He seems to speak a language of math and science. The eternal musical score is pleasing. The absence of sin is palpable. Newcomers are anticipated and welcome. It sounds as if Heaven hums with purposeful activity.
These accounts offer only peeks through the gates; different authors noticed different things – vegetation, villages, habitats, heavenly beings, but they all experienced unity and oneness.
In Heaven, we’re told by those who have tasted and seen God’s goodness, time doesn’t frogmarch a weary, frustrated population, nor does it stand still.
I haven’t read Ritchie’s book, written in 1978, but my friend Teri sent me this:

The last paragraph is "God is busy building a race of men who know how to love. I believe that the fate of the earth itself depends on the progress we make - and that the time now is very short. As for what we'll find in the next world, here too I believe that what we'll discover there depends on how well we get on with the business of loving, here and now."

When we watch the nightly news and wonder how we will ever dig ourselves out of an economic and moral deficit that threatens to undo us all, we would do well to remember that the business of loving is a profitable, high yield business with healthy returns that are not dependent on current economic and political conditions. That’s good news.