Nobody’s looking down on you
Something my grandfather said, weeks after almost losing my grandmother. ~4 min.
This is the deep end, and it's the one day of my newsletter regimen that is purely philosophical and not design related. Enjoy!
A couple weeks ago, I told you my grandmother was going in for surgery, and that it wasn’t certain she’d come out of it. The odds she was given were 25%.
She made it. The surgery went extremely well, and last Friday I got to go see her. She, my grandfather, and I hung out for a while, and the conversation went where you’d expect it to go when someone has just beaten odds like that: mortality, and what happens after.
We talked about family and friends we’d lost. And at some point my grandfather said, “There’s one thing people say about that I don’t believe. That they’re looking down on you from heaven.”
You’d think he’d want that one to be true
Think about who’s saying that. This is a man who, a few weeks earlier, had a 75% chance of never seeing his wife again.
If anybody has a reason to want the comfort of, it’s him. The idea that she’d still be up there keeping an eye on him, still paying attention to him after she was gone.
And he doesn’t buy it. I don’t either.
It’s one of those things we say at funerals and write in sympathy cards so often that nobody stops to question it. “She’s watching over you.” “He’s looking down right now, and he’s so proud.” It sounds kind. But it made me ask something I hadn’t really asked out loud: what is heaven, and what do you actually do while you’re there?
Heaven is the presence of God
Here’s what I believe: If you’re in heaven, you’re in the presence of God. Period. Not a nicer version of earth, not a cloud with a good view of the cul-de-sac. The presence of God.
And that definition changes a lot about how you look at it.
Look at what we’ve got down here. It’s an imperfect world. Things break, people get hurt, people die. We live inside those faults every day, and most of the time we’re so used to them we don’t even notice anymore.
Heaven is being in the presence of perfection, and we have no earthly conception of what that means, because nothing here comes close. Paul says as much in 1 Corinthians: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.”
So if you’re standing in the presence of that, in the full glory of what it actually is, why would you be focused on earthly things?
It’d be like getting a front row seat to the greatest show ever played and spending the whole night turned around, watching the parking lot.
Heaven is not about you
Here’s the uncomfortable part. I think “they’re looking down on you” is a selfish idea. Not cruel, not malicious, just selfish in the way grief can be.
It takes heaven, the most incredible experience available, and makes it about us. Our lives, our milestones, our bad days. It puts us at the center of somebody else’s eternity.
We’re trying to make ourselves seem more important than we really are.
Heaven is not about you.
And that’s good news. If they could see everything down here, they’d see all of it. Not just the graduation and the wedding, but the hospital waiting rooms and the bad diagnoses too. That doesn’t sound like perfection. That sounds like being forced to watch the brokenness they finally got relief from.
Let them have it
So what do I do with the people I’ve lost?
When I think about them, I try not to picture them watching me. I try to think about what they’re experiencing right now, and how good that is for them.
It takes the focus off of us and puts it back on them, which is where it should’ve been anyway.
Wanting them to keep watching is wanting to keep them for ourselves. And if heaven is what I believe it is, keeping them would mean robbing them of something amazing.
My grandmother’s still here, and I’m grateful for every Friday we get. But someday, when it’s her time, I don’t want her looking back.
I want her looking at God.
— Zach
