Perhaps our lack of awe about eternal life is due, at least in part, to our tendency to fit everything into familiar categories.  “Our imagination can only picture a perfection on our own scale.”[1]  If paradise is simply the best aspects of our present life perfected, that would be good and even wonderful.  But we might not see it as awe-inspiring, or at least not for long. 

An eternity of ever increasing joy in knowing God is beyond our comprehension.  If we believe that Jesus desires for us to participate in His joy (John 15:11), then knowing now that we are destined for joy that is inexpressible will build our anticipation.  We may not know exactly what it will be like to share in the joy of Jesus, but we can trust that it will be better than we can imagine. 

The following excerpt from a Madeleine L’Engle novel illustrates that inexpressibility for me, and it leads me into awe about eternal life. – mw

“So maybe there’s a planet somewhere where nobody has any eyes.”

“Well, if nobody had any eyes, they’d all get along all right without them, wouldn’t they?”

“They’d get along with hearing, and smell, and touch, but they wouldn’t have any idea what anything looked like.”

“And if someone from our planet went to the planet where no one had eyes, and tried to describe something to them-the way the rain looks falling on the ocean, or the lighthouse beam at night, or the sunrise-it couldn’t be done, could it?”

“If you didn’t have eyes, if you lived in a world of touch and sound, then nobody could tell you what anything looks like.”

“Well, maybe when the people on the planet with no eyes die, then maybe they get sent to planets where there are eyes. But you couldn’t tell them about it ahead of time.”

“So, maybe when we die, we’ll get something as important as sight, but because we don’t know what it is, nobody could tell us about it now, any more than we could explain sight to the people on a planet with no eyes.”[2]

[1] Simone Weil, quoted in Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With The Dead (New York:  Penguin Press, 2020), 40.

[2] Excerpts from Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light, (New York:  Laurel-Leaf Books, 1982), 227-228.