Not in Kansas Anymore

After I realized I couldn’t watch military members surprise homecoming videos anymore (cry all the tears!), I moved onto watching videos of deaf people getting hearing implants or babies getting glasses to help them see. Those are also tearjerkers! (Why, emotions, why!!)

For example: this man has been living a colorless life for 66 years. His family gives him special glasses to fix his colorblindness and voila! The world snaps into color. If you watch to the end of the video (have Kleenex ready), the reference is made about the classic film Wizard of Oz, how Dorothy leaves the gray and colorless state of Kansas and steps through the door into the technicolor dreamworld of Oz.

“All their life in this world
and all their adventures
had only been the cover and the title page:
now at last they were beginning
Chapter One of the Great Story
which no one on earth has read:
which goes on for ever:
in which every chapter is better
than the one before.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

This body-builder in the video was brought to tears by seeing color for the first time. Because color, like the other senses, is something that you have to experience to understand. You can rationally explain that it’s on the light spectrum, but until someone sees “yellow” they don’t know what it means.

Over the Rainbow

I assume that it will be like that when we get to heaven. There isn’t much written about heaven in the Bible because I don’t think it’s something our minds can understand without experiencing it.

The wheels within wheels of Ezekiel and the beasts with eyes all around in Revelation. What is that all about? It’s like yellow to a blind person.

In I Corinthians 13, the chapter approaches its close with this verse:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. — I Cor. 13:12

How amazing will it be to be in heaven and realize it’s so much greater than we could ever have imagined. It’s more than just fishing with Grandpa and giving our lost babies hugs and kisses. We shall dwell in the presence of the almighty God. We shall be restored as we were meant to be when we were created.

Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. — I John 3:2

Normally I do not speculate on the verses in the Bible about God wiping away the tears from our eyes (Is. 25:8 , Rev. 21:4). Some preachers and teachers come up with specific reasons we’ll have tears (lost opportunities to witness, our works being judged and burning up, etc.). I tend to believe this verse is more descriptive. We have so many reasons to cry here on earth, but those reasons will not be there in heaven. There won’t be pain, sickness, death.

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Savior come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.
— Charles Wesley
“O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing”

However, if there is a specific event that would make us tear up when we get to heaven, my speculation is that it will be very similar to what causes the tears in the deaf when they hear a voice for the first time, the blind child when they can see their mother, or the man who lived six decades in a flat and muddy world until he put on those special glasses.

If there are tears in heaven, I think it’s because of the joy of no longer seeing through a glass darkly.

When we see the One who is Love face to face.

“For I know that my Redeemer lives,
And He shall stand at last on the earth;

And after my skin is destroyed, this I know,
That in my flesh I shall see God,

Whom I shall see for myself,
And my eyes shall behold, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me! — Job 19:25-27

My heart too, Job. My heart too.

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New King James Version (NKJV)

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.