Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

So when people ask, “What will we do in heaven?” one possible answer is to simply ask: “What do you love to do now that will go on in the world to come?”

What is it that when you do it, you lose track of time because you get lost in it? What do you do that makes you think, “I could do this forever”?

Heaven is both the peace, stillness, serenity, and calm that come from having everything in its right place—that state in which nothing is required, needed, or missing—and the endless joy that comes from participating in the ongoing creation of the world.

So when we hear that a certain person has “rejected Christ,” we should first ask, “Which Christ?”

That’s why wealth is so dangerous: if you’re not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.

I believe the discussion itself is divine.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live.

The ancient sages said the words of the sacred text were black letters on a white page—there’s all that white space, waiting to be filled with our responses and discussions and debates and opinions and longings and desires and wisdom and insights.