All the Way to Heaven

“Your eyes will see the king in all his splendour." (Isaiah 33:17)

A number of weeks ago before lockdown and social distancing, a friend was telling me how, as a child, she always loved going to a midnight church service on Christmas Eve. She wasn’t a Christian at the time, but there was just something that she felt that she couldn’t explain; a joy, a happiness, a sense of wonder. 
​
For me, it was Easter Sunday. Long before I ever became a Christian, I woke up with an excitement each Easter Sunday morning. It wasn’t the kind of excitement you associate with birthdays and Christmas. This was more like an expectation, an anticipation. I never questioned it; I never wondered about it; I just loved and enjoyed it.

It wasn’t till many years later, after I became a Christian, that I realised that, like my friend, what we actually were experiencing was something spiritual. It was as though God had opened a window in Heaven for us and something of Heaven spilled to earth and splashed upon our unawakened spirits. 

In her book, ‘All the way to Heaven’, Elisabeth Sherrill explores this truth that, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we can experience something of Heaven even as we are journeying toward it. As the author writes:

​‘Heaven has become more real to me than the ground beneath my feet.
Real in the past, real for the future, and best of all, real right now’
(All the Way to Heaven by Elizabeth Sherrill,
​published by Eagle Publishing Ltd).

Although I still wake up each Easter Sunday morning with that same sense of joy and expectation,  these experiences are no longer confined to one day a year. As the scripture verse tells us, ‘Your eyes will see the king in all his splendour’. This is what God wants to do for us; He wants to reveal His splendour to us; not just today, not just tomorrow, but all the way to Heaven! 

Have a blessed Easter.

Pauline Anderson ​
​