MCLEODS, New Brunswick, May 8, 2024 – Jesus says that you if you love your loved ones more than him, you’re not worthy of him.

Jesus says that if you don’t pick up your cross and bear it like a yoke every day, you’re not worthy of him.

We see through our own eyes and by our own understanding, but we need to see through God’s eyes and by his grace.

Heaven is a hella place to get into. I wouldn’t want to be there if I weren’t worthy of it. I wouldn’t want you to be there, either, if you weren’t worthy.

The world, for want of a better word, sucks. I wanted to be more positive here, but there’s no point in lying. There’s no point in using a sugar-coated donut word when a plain one will do. The world is the realm of death and dying, of built-in obsolescence, and it was made that way by God himself. God made it to be the realm of death and dying and built-in obsolescence. God made the world to suck so that we’d look for something better and hope for something more, not in the way the devil does, trying to make something of time and space that it can never be, but wishing and hoping for something, I don’t know, something we can only see in our mind’s eye and feel with our heart. The realm of dreams and visions, but dreams and visions from God, not from the other side.

I don’t want anything in Heaven to suck, and from I’ve seen so far, nothing does. It’s perfect, but not in a cloying way, not in a fake way, like impossibly white capped teeth. Heaven and all those in it are unaware of their perfection because they have nothing to compare it to – there are no imperfections in Heaven and no memory of the imperfect world, so what they see is what they get, and what they see is perfection and only perfection.

I have cried over people I know who are gone now and I do not think made it Home. I weep and pray over those who are still here but who want nothing to do with God, let alone Jesus. God tells me who to weep and pray over and who to let be and let go. I do as he says. There’s no winning that argument with God.

There are those who call themselves Christian and yet who question God’s decision about who gets into Heaven and who doesn’t. Well, that’s an argument as old as the fall of Lucifer himself and just as unwinnable. Who are we to question God’s judgement? Jesus argued with his enemies over this same point of doctrine. They thought being a child of Abraham was all it took to get into Paradise, but they were dead wrong. The more Jesus tried to warn them just how wrong they were, the more they hated him for it.

People today think you only have to “believe” – close your eyes and cross your fingers and click your heels together three times. They think believing is as easy as blowing out birthday candles. But believing is what Jesus said it is – picking up your yoke daily and labouring not in a course of your choosing but being driven by a hand you cannot see. That means choosing to love your enemies when every cell in your body wants to kill them in their sleep. That means choosing to do what Jesus taught us to do rather than what we want to do. Belief starts with a decision of the will, not a feeling. Belief starts with doing something you may not want to do but you choose to do for the sole reason that Jesus taught you to do it so you know it’s the right thing to do. And after you’ve sincerely made the decision and God knows you have, he fills you with belief, the way a child colors inside the lines.

I do not know if I’ll make it Home. I played the Wicked Witch of the West in my high school musical. Not Dorothy. Not Aunty Em. Not the Good Witch. Not even Toto, the dog. I was the witch who was condemned even before she’d stepped into the spotlight. In my stage make-up, I was as ugly on the outside as I was on the inside and I scared “Dorothy” so much that she refused to go on stage with me at one point. The children in the audience were screaming and howling and running out of the auditorium in tears. I didn’t see all this; I only found out about it afterwards when the adults were laughing at how scared their kids were of me. I had no recollection of it; it was to me as if it hadn’t happened.

You would not have wanted that Charlotte in Heaven.

The world is full of what I once was. There are billions of what I used to be running around out there. I don’t want any of what used to be inside of me and is now inside of them to get into Heaven. Jesus says that if we love brother or sister or mother or father or husband or wife more than him, we are not worthy of him. He said if we love our own lives here, we’ll lose the only life that’s worth living.

Those who make it to Heaven will have no recollection of the Hell they left behind, including anyone they knew who didn’t make it Home. They’ll only remember the good, but only God is good, so they’ll only remember God. I am grateful for that promise.

It’s God’s decision, who makes it Home. Being a Christian isn’t a ticket to paradise. Even being born-again isn’t a ticket.

Belief isn’t a mindset or a recitation or a forced opinion; it’s not something you put on like a costume or stage make-up: It’s a state of being that comes from God and God only. You don’t choose to believe; you choose to submit to God, who then fills you with his Spirit and you believe. Belief becomes your de facto state of being so that it’s not something you contrive but something you are.

Submission to God you can choose. But belief – genuine belief – comes only from God.