Christmas Isn’t Heaven…

“You drove me crazy when you would take the tree down on Christmas Day.”

This from my middle son.

Youngest son is listening to the exchange, his blue eyes are wisely old in his not old body. He doesn’t voice an opinion.

“It was so depressing when you did this when we were little,” continued that sensitive middle one.

“I have promised I will wait this year, a little longer,” I say this outloud but in my head I am wondering how long I will have to. The truth it this: I absolutely love decorating my Christmas tree. I have hundreds of ornaments, homemade and purchased, gifts that span decades, stored in tens of boxes. For ten months of the year, they are wrapped in tissue or placed in boxes with soft padding, layered one upon the other until Silent Bob brings the boxes in just after Thanksgiving. There is hardly a one that doesn’t bring a flood of memories with it.

“It’s all of those homemade ornaments,” says middle son. “Our tree was very different than my friends.”

This makes sense as I remember the little glass greenhouse that Mother gave me four or five years ago. I always hang it on a middle branch so it catches the eye. It’s one of my favorites. Several little LED lights shine through the tiny windows, the painted flowers and ferns, sparkling among the tree branches. It’s a reminder of Mother’s greenhouse in Arkansas. My dad made it for her, purchasing the kit, with it’s curved glass eaves from a Texas manufactuer. In the winter, the foggy windows and wet dirt sent the sweet smell of growing things, heavy and hot into your lungs as the sun hung low in the winter sky.

It’s not just my John that thinks our tree is special.

Every single tree from every single family represents an ongoing timeline in balls and tinsel and tiny ornamental moments that tell and retell the life of a family.

It’s really something.

So why do I loath the packing of Christmas? (I wouldn’t dare tell my middle son I have considered not even decorating…)

There is promise in decorating. Taking it all down is the end of expectations when Christmas is done.

For something a bit around 6 weeks, we harbor the hope of joy. We strive for it. We prepare food and gifts around times made for kind banter and fun, ever with the hope that those who get along and those who don’t miraculously will this time. No matter how hard we plan or pray, inherent to the season is the fact that it just doesn’t last long enough or come true and perfect enough.

We are left with the dirty business of putting it all away.

So I was driving down the road yesterday, planning on packing Christmas when I got home. That youngest son next to me, quiet and thoughtful as usual, the cab of the truck warm, the countryside dry and brittle with winter, I thought about my oldest. The physical part of him, the blue eyes, his fine blonde hair, the strong shoulders and back and a wrist bone that carried the scar of a break, are now just dusty chemical elements in a box that I have hidden among my things. His heart that loved Christmas, the mind that as he had gotten older enlisted his brothers to cook our Christmas dinner, the quiet, slightly melancholy, sad-cowboy-sorrow-alcohol-drowning-song soul of him are memories tucked away in my soul, a few gently strung and remembered as ornaments on a tree.

But as you read this, it has to resonate that my Jake, just my like my John and my Josh or you or any of us humans aren’t merely flesh and blood reduced to nothing but memories when our bodies are gone.

There is something more.

For me, the most telling proof of this ‘something more’ is love. The power that love can wield cannot be explained in ways we science minded people want. After our bodies go, my heart, my experiences, the love inside me, tells me there is an after-this-life.

So, what is Heaven like?

Heaven in supernatural terms ensures that science offers no help for understanding. According to Scripture, which given my latest iterations of understanding, indicates that Heaven quite possibly involves some place called Paradise where we wait for the second coming and new bodies.

And then in that warm cab, I had a thought.

Maybe one way to think about heaven is that’s its a whole lotta Christmas.

Without ever having to pack up.

Think about it… Based on the love patterned for us here by Jesus, the very atmosphere of Heaven would be festive with the plans and decorations of a never ending Christmas season. Waves of love, sweetly blowing through streets of gold, carrying a love that never wanes, reflected onto everyone for ever! Like the anticipation and the expectation that is part of Christmas, Heaven is an eternal place of laughter and goodwill and peace and unending joy, with the next minute only bound to get better than the last. Forever.