There is something just unnatural about saying goodbye. This week, as I leave my relatives who live in California, I feel like I’m leaving a part of me behind. But I also get this feeling that there are more memories to share, more ways to grow – all these things that … just didn’t happen.

No matter how much time you spend with someone you love, whenever you leave, your time seems incomplete. (Now, if you aren’t particularly fond of someone, that’s a different story.)

To be honest, I question if there’s something – a remnant of our perfect human nature before the fall – that causes this awkwardness. I honestly don’t think goodbyes were a part of the original creation.

Separation. The first time a separation if would occurred, it was when Adam and Eve were separated from their Creator, the one who made them complete. That was when emptiness entered the world.

It’s that same emptiness you have when you try to fill yourself with entertainment or busyness or food or relationships or pleasure but you still end up feeling emptier at the end than you thought you would at the beginning.

I have a lot of friends who are afraid of Heaven. They wonder what it will be like, if it will be boring, whether or not their dog will be there, whether they will remember friends and event from earth or if their memory will be wiped or something.

But think about it. We were made for Heaven. We were created by our creator to be with our creator in the place he created us to be in. How could it not be everything we could ever desire in a location, more than we could imagine, and a place where every dream and desire can be met?

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, if I have a desire for something that can’t be achieved here in this life, why would I have even been infused with that desire, unless God had a fulfillment of that desire infused in my real destination? (unless, of course, the world is cruel and meaningless, in which case any desire for meaning is a mistake of nature.)

For this reason, I believe that, in Heaven, where we belong, there will be no more goodbyes. We will all live in one great city, one with a perfect government, no political parties, no churches, no prisons.

There will probably be libraries, though, or something like them, because we will always be discovering new elements and formulas and masterpieces of God. There will be music studios. Better music than you’ve ever heard. There will be plenty of work, goals to achieve, heights to reach – but without problems with bureaucracy and burnout.
But there will be no goodbyes. Not like this.

(Disclaimer: Nowhere in the Biblical canon is there word of heavenly music studios. But from what I know about God jus personally, and from his word, and the way the world is, there is a lot we can know about Heaven, and a lot we can at least get our hopes up about since all our hopes will be trumped by Heaven’s reality anyway. For a good book about Heaven, check out the book Heaven by Randy Alcorn.)