ponderings on heaven

I've always loved music and wanted to be able to play and sing. Whenever I sing to myself, it sounds good and I was happy, but I have a brother who has more of an ear for music than I do and he always told me I didn't sound good. So recently I did record myself singing and yes, it sounded awful. Seriously.

Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that it sounds good in my head, I don't know. Yes it's quite hard, but there was one thing that stuck out for me as good. One of my current favourite songs, the one I tried to sing, was "Better Than a Hallelujah" by Amy Grant. One line says "God just hears a melody".... so to God, even if we are the most horrific singers ever, well not to Him, I bet it's a beautiful melody to His ears.

This topic is also making me think of heaven. Since we'll have new bodies and everything's gonna be great up there, I'm sure we'll be able to do loads of things we just can't do here on earth. Another time I think of heaven a lot, especially lately, is when people say they're moving away. A while of sadness and grumping later, then I just realise what BLISS it's gonna be up there. There's an old hymn that says we shall never part again. I like to think it not only means no more parting from death, but also that we won't have to live far away, we'll be able to be together forever.

While I'm on the topic of heaven, it reminds me of one of the songs we've been hearing on Grandad's old LP records - many beautiful songs, but this one is called Will There Be Any Stars?
It's sung by Burl Ives

It talks about "Will there be any stars in my crown?" This is kind of a different topic from above, but the stars in the crown refer to good things we do on this earth that make God pleased. Whether it's really stars or not, I don't know, but they're little rewards, or something like that. Whatever, it's all gonna be good. But it does say that as much as we long to be there, there's things we need to do here first. Different for each one of us.

Still on this theme, another old song talks about "the good Lord's blessed the labour of these two hard-working hands and when all of life is over ... then these hands of mine shall touch the hands of God". Pretty much what I talked about before, but at the beginning of the chorus the singer belts out: There'll be a welcome there for me! And I find it really touching hearing words like that sung by people who have since passed into eternity and are up there enjoying this life at this moment. Same when I remember people say things like "my name's written in the book of life and someday I'm going up to be with Jesus", in no time at all, they're there.

That song brought to mind something else so I'll write about that too. It begins with "There are many things in life that I cannot understand". I'm sure that's true of us all. One thing about heaven that I've pondered without a productive answer, concerns those who died and were old enough to think for themselves, but for whatever reason weren't like an adult but more like a child and maybe their brain didn't work for figuring things out. I know it's simple enough for loads of people to understand, and I'm having a hard time describing what kind of people I'm on about, but I hope folks reading this will understand where I'm coming from. On this, I don't think there's really a concrete answer. So this song tells us, well we're not God and we'll just have to wait to know these things!