Concerning the Eternal Destination of Stuffies

A number of years ago I made my first attempt to explain heaven to my oldest son, Isaac.  Considering what was at stake it was really important to me to do a good job.  I did my best, but I’m afraid the attempt went downhill fast – it has been recorded in the history books as one of my great big parenting failures (ending with him crying desperately, begging NEVER to have to go there)!  

I confess that as a child heaven didn’t appeal to me either.  The idea of meeting God had me afraid that I would see him, be terrified, and pee my pants.  And just what were we going to do up there…FOREVER??  I loved singing, but that was a long time.   And what was the point if I had to leave behind everything I knew except for God?  A lot of how I knew God came through the people in my life and through my experiences.  Would I even remember those experiences?  Would I recognize the people that I love?  

  

Heaven seemed like a foreign place.   

Earth felt like home.

As a child, and still after the Isaac incident I remained confused about heaven.  I was puzzled by the mixed messages the Bible seemed to send about what exactly heaven was.  In one passage it would say “heaven and earth may pass away” and in another it would talk about a new heaven and a new earth.   

Where?  I wondered.    

When Jesus ascended he went “up” so was it somewhere in space?  Was it in another dimension?  

Other passages about new bodies left me confused, too.  Would they be spiritual bodies?  Would we become like the angels, who often look like humans in scripture, yet weren’t human?  Would I look at all like myself still?  Would the way we look freeze at the age we died?  If so, would some look like little children and others old?   

As a child I didn’t hear anyone attempting to answer these questions so I added them to the realm of “mystery.” But, since the Isaac incident I’ve been unsettled leaving it there.   

Why would God leave us with no answers to this question?  What appeal is there in a completely unknown future?

Second Chances

Now I find myself with another chance to improve on my past parental failure.  My middle child has been asking questions about heaven and hell.  He is really trying to understand.  I wish I had recordings of our conversations to remember his deeply thoughtful questions, his genuine searching and reflecting.  His probing questions found me pulling a book off my shelf by one of my former profs, Randal Rauser:  What on Earth Do We Know about Heaven?.

In this book Randal Rauser proposes a “heavenly equation” to herald the biblical vision of heaven.  I’m just beginning the book and I’m excited to embark on this journey into all the Bible says about heaven and consider how I can communicate God’s Word on the subject to my kids.  I just may do a better job this time!  I’m a little over a chapter in and I can already see that it’s a brilliant, clear, carefully written, and yet sometimes playful read.  Maybe you want to read it with me?

In the following excerpt from the book Randal Rauser illustrates the heavenly equation using one of my favorite childhood stories:  The Velveteen Rabbit.  

[This book] tells the story of a stuffed toy rabbit that longs to become Real.  In a conversation with his close friend the Skin horse, he discusses a question that is bursting with philosophical profundity:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side-by-side near the nursery fender, before Nana came into the room.  “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the skin horse.  “It’s a thing that happens to you.  When a child really loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but REALLY loves you, then you become real.”

Rauser expounds, “According to the Skin Horse, when a child loves a toy – really loves it – that love can make that toy real.  And according to the heavenly equation, when God loves his creation – really loves it – that love transforms creation into perfection and thereby makes it real.  The thesis of this book may be an equation, but its heart is a love story, a story of becoming real.  It is the story of how God so loved the world that he sent his Son to make it, to make us all, real.”

I'd like to introduce to you...
 In our home we have one such REAL stuffy.  He’s a little organic stuffed monkey named Nounours (AKA:  Nunu).  The name’s a bit of a long story, but he came to life by the love of a young boy named Oliver.  His favorite since birth, Nunu has grown into a real part of our family.  He has a voice, preferences, a dynamic personality.  He loves.  He hurts (Band-Aids help).  He even misbehaves.  This little stuffy is so real that he can pretend with the best of them.  He has his favorite jokes.  He loves to play.  He says his prayers every evening and professes his love for the One True God.  I don’t know if stuffies go to heaven, but if being real is one of the criteria we just might enjoy eternity with him!

Maybe I should clarify that Rauser doesn’t intend to address the eternal destination of stuffies in his book (or maybe he does…  I’ll have to wait and see).  A quick perusal of the table of contents reveals his book is organized around a number of questions that we probably all find ourselves asking:  Where is heaven now?  What does it mean that heaven will be perfected?  How old will we be?  Will we get older?  Will we all be beautiful?  Will anyone be deaf?  Will we still get thirsty? Hungry? Sleepy?  Will there still be sweet melancholy?  Will we love everyone the same?  Will we have special friends?  Will we still have free will?  If my child goes to hell, will I know and will I care?  Should we hope that everyone will be saved?

Many of these are the same questions I asked as a child and my children ask now.  Kids are born curious.  They naturally seek out information to make sense of their environment.  ALL children want to learn.  As a parent it can be exhausting to answer the non-stop questions of a young child.  Sometimes I’m tempted to give a pat answer or tune out, BUT, when I’m careful to notice, their questions represent much more than I normally tend to pick up on.  I believe that how we go about answering (or not answering) their questions will impact the way they learn in the future, and specifically, the development of their faith.

Passin' the Faith Along

As a parent, I find comfort – a certain parental security – in knowing that my children attend Sunday School where they will learn about God through a carefully thought out curriculum that (ideally) sequentially teaches them everything they need to know about the Bible and spirituality.  It’s also a great idea to have a thought through plan for how we want to go about teaching our children at home.  When both community and home work together, even better. 

A scope and sequence is a great way to ensure that one has (at least at some point) dealt with the most important stuff.  That being said, dealing with a topic at an appointed time will never have the same impact as dealing with a question when it’s burning in a child’s mind.  A child’s question is an opportunity like no other!  Their attention is focused.  Their interest is piqued.  They’re downright ready to learn.

Something else that’s easy to miss is that when learning topics are always prescribed (and the children's questions are deferred because they're not on topic), their questions start to seem unnecessary.  Some eventually stop asking questions (especially if they are always immediately redirected back to the prescribed task).  Other kids become afraid to express their curiosity because it seems to annoy the teacher .  In a Sunday School setting indulging a rabbit trail for a few moments here and there (followed by gently redirecting them back to the task) can go a long way to encourage a continued state of "wonder." 

The Center for Spiritual Growth

Spiritual education through the community of faith is a comfort and provides a necessary foundation for spiritual development, but it’s not meant to be the primary place of learning for a child.  God designed FAMILIES to be the primary center for Spiritual Growth!  It’s no coincidence that this is the context where children typically ask their burning questions.  

In our house the questions come most frequently during our scripture reading as a family, when we reflect on the day together in the evening, and also when they're experienced a confusing event in their life and they're trying to make sense of it.  I might be crazy, but I’ve made it my goal to answer EVERY question that they ask me.  If I can, I attend to the question immediately.  Obviously, that’s not always possible, so I try to write them down and come back to them later.  For me this feels daunting because, let’s face it, I don’t have all the answers.  So much pressure!!  

With each child I've relaxed a little more.  Time has taught me that my kids don’t need me to give them all the answers!  What they need every bit as much as the answers is to develop the skills they need to study the scriptures and the ability think logically so they can continue to learn and grow throughout their life.  As I've studied how children learn I'VE learned that the best way to do this is to resist feeding them the "right answers."  

Here's why:  When the primary mode of teaching consists of feeding children spiritual principles and beliefs to memorize (ie. God loves you; God is good; You are special to God; Sin is bad; Do unto others) they eventually STOP thinking and asking intuitive questions, and ask for answers instead.  They start to think they can’t know/learn anything they haven’t been told.  Later in life they are less able to process opposition to what they have been taught, because they haven’t done the mental work themselves.  Often they begin to blindly accept what they are told as long as they trust the person doing the telling (be it a parent, a teacher, a friend, a commercial, a facebook post…).  It leaves them much more susceptible to the messages and peer pressures of the teenage years.

 

Even though it feels safer as a parent to make sure my kids have memorized all the right beliefs, and it feels like a risk to go about teaching them in a less direct way, in the long run it’s the more secure route to include this kind of education, too! I'll share more about this in a future post about "How Children Learn."

So, I've tried to change the way I approach passing on the faith to my kids.  There will always be a need for clear and direct teaching, but what I'm talking about here is a starting point for their questions.  Rather than always starting with the answers to their questions, I begin with exploration together.   They don't need to be right right away.  They just need to get there.

Depending on the topic and their level of understanding (which, as their mother, I have a pretty good sense of) I try to help them search for the answers in a variety of ways.  This may look like guiding them in searching the scriptures or recalling passages we’ve studied or a passage we've memorized in the past, or sharing a relevant Bible Story.  It might be allowing them to process something new through play.  As much as possible I try to ask them questions that don’t imply the answer, but encourage them to think it through for themselves.  Its takes more mental work on my part (and theirs), and goodness, it takes A LOT of patience.  Interestingly it hasn't taken much more time because the conversations extend over days, weeks, months.  We interact with the events going on in our lives, and it actually becomes a much more natural, organic task. 

I believe that as parents (grandparents, Sunday School teachers, the community of faith) we need to help our kids learn to ask questions, imagine, explore, find answers, problem solve, and be okay with making mistakes and now knowing everything yet.  Demonstrating the limits of our own understanding and sharing with them our never ending thirst for the scriptures and learning will be vital to successfully passing on a hungry and thirsty spirituality to our kids that is characterized by life-long growth.

Many of the questions addressed in What on Earth Do We Know About Heaven are the very same questions my kids have asked.  Typically kids begin asking these types of questions in what Piaget called the Preoperational stage of mental development (Ages 2-7).  While they don’t have the ability for complex logic yet, this stage sets the groundwork for developing it.  They deal with the world symbolically-representationally.  They experiment with real life using their imagination.  This is how they "get to know." Its how they process the real world.  It's how they learn!  Its a necessary stage to go through in order to develop more complex logic later in life.

What can we do to inspire our children to wonder?

So, where DO stuffies go when they die?

In Nunu’s life Oliver plays the role of daddy, and at 32 I already find myself a grandma (and have been one for some time now).  As Nunu explores behavior and misbehaviour he is corrected (and rightly so) by his dad. When he confesses his sin he realizes the gravity of what he’s done, and he feels sad.  Sometimes when he talks about heaven he gets things wrong, but dad’s there to help him understand.   Maybe we should reconsider the relevance of the eternal destination of stuffies!  Afterall, these playful explorations of theology are a natural child-like way to examine just such questions.  In Oliver’s life, we are not so different from Nunu.  We may have different “stuff” inside, but we are curious.  We are loved.  We are real.

YOUTUBE: A short interview with Oliver and Nunu