Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

I will forgive their iniquity,
and I will remember their sin no more.
                 Jeremiah 31:34 KJV

And into this bright heaven, who is admitted? Everyone? An elect few? Christians only? Good people only?

After Return from Tomorrow was published, a number of readers wrote to challenge me with such questions. Questions far beyond my ken! Even as respected a Christian theologian as Henry Ward Beecher, that nineteenth-century champion of freedom for slaves and votes for women, would venture no opinion on who goes to heaven.

"I'll probably have three surprises there," he said. "To find people I never expected to see among the elect. To look in vain for some I was sure would qualify. And the biggest surprise of - to find myself there!"

In that realm whose signature is surprise, the population will probably astonish us all. That Christianity is the Way to heaven, I do not doubt. That in Jesus are many ways, I suspect. Ways where in his limitless humility he works unrecognized. Such theological depths I happily leave to those qualified to plumb them; the only one whose eligibility for heaven need concern me is myself.

When I first became a Christian, "sin" was as novel a concept to me as "salvation." As I slowly grasped its import, my misdeeds and failings loomed as impassable roadblocks on the journey so recently begun. I discovered the church's traditional list of "seven deadly sins" and pasted it as a checklist to the inside cover of my brand-new Bible.

       Pride
       Covetousness
       Lust
       Anger
       Gluttony
       Envy
       Sloth

Struggling with new self-imposed standards of behavior, I could convict myself of several of them any day of the week.

I would repent, try harder, fail once more. The only thing that has changed through the years is my attitude toward this dismal record. What I began to notice was that those who'd walked this Way longest were also the ones most conscious of their own sinfulness.

And least troubled by it.

"No one is good but God alone," Jesus told a young man who wanted to lead a blameless life. And for these mature souls, God's goodness was enough.

One of my favorite stories about St. Francis records his response to a companion who feared he wasn't good enough to get into heaven. "I still have not attained purity of heart," Brother Leo lamented.