Excited For Heaven

“Today you will be with me in paradise.”

—Luke 23:43

In my last conversation with Grandma Hybels, we talked a lot about heaven. She told me she was so excited to go there and that she felt like it was taking a long time. One of the reasons she was most excited about heaven is because there she’ll be reunited with her husband. For a woman who had been widowed for more than thirty years, I can’t imagine the sweetness of that reunion. She spoke in great detail about wanting to see her sisters and brothers and looking forward to a time when age and disease and pain are gone.

We’ll miss Grandma terribly. But we know, with as much certainty as we know anything, that she is in heaven, free from pain and disease, reunited with Christ, with a husband she’s missed for three decades, and with the brothers and sisters she loved dearly. And for that, we’re so thankful.

The way to honor my grandma’s life, I believe, is to live with her faith, simplicity, prayerfulness, and kindness, by living simply in order to give generously, by serving without wanting recognition, by putting the needs of others above our own, by praying for the people we love.