Did You Know?

Okay, it's time for Did You Know?, our 5334-part series on things about me that you might not have been familiar with.

Tim Fact #1 -- I used to lie in bed awake at night afraid of heaven.

It's true. When I was a kid I used to lie awake at night and think about heaven and how scary it was. I mean, what if I didn't like it? Think about what you get told about heaven in Sunday School.

Heaven is a place where:

• You will be there forever.
• Nothing that you have here will be there (no toys!).
• Until they die no one you know will be there, and some people you know will go to hell instead, and will never be there.
• You will never be sad, or feel pain. This is one of the parts I had a problem with, along with the next one.
• You will not feel any of these negative emotions, even for the people you left behind. You won't even care what happens on Earth.
• Your relationships will not be the same, and what they will be is ambiguous. You might not have a family, and you won't have best friends, or everybody will be your best friend. Husbands and wives might not be married, etc.
• Depending on who's giving the lecture, you might not even remember your life, and if you do you won't care about it.

Now of course you are told that it is a wonderful place and that you will be happy there, but since most of the descriptions of heaven seem (or seemed) to have more to do with what isn't there than what is, that's hard to hold on to, so at night I would lie awake staring at the ceiling with a cold knot in my stomach, not only scared of heaven, but scared that if I didn't want to go, then maybe God wouldn't let me in.