Let’s Talk About the Afterlife We Actually Hope For

When I was seven, my Sunday School teacher — Mrs. Spencer — asked us to draw what we thought heaven looked like. She wore a floral blouse buttoned all the way to the top and always smelled faintly of mothballs mixed with stale church coffee.

She always wore a blue, knitted cardigan and called everyone “sweetie,” even when we were clearly up to no good.

It was one of those hot, breathless mornings where the ceiling fans did little more than push around the stale scent of old carpet and dusty hymnbooks. We sat cross-legged on the cold church floor, our legs sticking slightly to the tile, a half-dead tub of markers between us and a stack of butcher paper curling at the edges.

“Draw what you think heaven looks like,” Mrs. Spencer said, smiling like she knew the answer and was just waiting for us to catch up.

I didn’t think too hard about it. I just regurgitated what I’d absorbed from Sunday School posters and Christian cartoons: a massive golden castle floating in the clouds, surrounded by smiling, winged angels. I even gave them harps. There was no sun — just a kind of glowing warmth coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was pastel and perfect and — if I’m being honest — kind of depressing.

The message was clear, even if no one said it out loud: Heaven was like one big never-ending worship service. No skateboards. No snacks. No dogs. Just singing forever. And not the kind of singing you could dance to — no joyful noise or campfire harmonies. This was polished, serious, proper praise.

Eternal.

At seven years old, that already sounded like a nightmare. At forty-something, it still kind of does.

Don’t get me wrong — I believe in something beyond this life. I do. But I’ve had to unlearn a lot of what I was taught about what that something is. Because if the best sales pitch we can come up with is an “eternal church,” we’re not describing heaven — we’re describing hell.

Where Did We Get This Weird Picture of Heaven?

Looking back, I’m not exactly sure where the golden castle idea came from — but I know it didn’t come from Jesus. It came from Sunday School posters, Christian cartoon videos, and that one line in the King James Bible about “mansions,” which, had anyone bothered to explain the Greek to us, probably just meant “room” or “place to stay.” But no — what we heard was “luxury real estate in the sky.”

The version I absorbed was part fairy tale, part church service, and part reward chart. Heaven was the prize for being good, the place where all your hard work down here paid off. You got your white robe, your harp, your permanent ticket to the worship concert, and apparently your own heavenly property — custom built by Jesus himself. It all sounded, in hindsight, weirdly capitalist. A divine meritocracy where the better you behaved, the nicer your mansion and the bigger your crown.

And strangely… not all that appealing.

The longer I sit with it, the more I realise that the version of heaven I was handed wasn’t really meant to inspire wonder. It was meant to ease anxiety. It was a tidy, predictable answer to the big unknown of death. No pain. No fear. No mess. Just eternal calm and vaguely spiritual activity.

No wonder it ended up sounding like church — all very… vanilla, inoffensive. And completely unrecognisable from anything Jesus actually said.

What Jesus Said About Heaven

For all the sermons I heard growing up, very few of them actually quoted what Jesus said about heaven. Which is strange, considering he wouldn’t shut up about it.

He talked about it constantly — but not in the way we expected. There were no timelines, no floorplans, no detailed descriptions of celestial real estate. No clouds, no harps, no polished worship sets echoing through eternity.

And no halos. In fact, the word “halo” isn’t in the Bible.

Instead, he told stories.

He said heaven was like a wedding banquet where the guests of honour didn’t bother to show up, so the host opened the doors wide to whoever was hanging around — the poor, the misfits, the ones no one thought to invite. He said it was like yeast worked into dough, slow and hidden and alive, transforming everything from the inside out. Like a treasure someone finds buried in a field and immediately goes and sells everything they own, just to hold it again. Like a pearl so stunning it makes all your other possessions look meaningless.

Sometimes he talked about a farmer, hurling seed in every direction — not carefully planting, but throwing it with reckless generosity, not even minding if half of it landed on rocks or thorns.

In other words, Jesus didn’t describe heaven as a reward we collect later. He described it as something already breaking in. Something hidden in plain sight. Something we brush past every day without realising it.

And it wasn’t reserved for the religious elite or the morally successful. The people who saw it — really saw it — were the ones who weren’t even looking for it. The ones on the edges. The ones who were hungry, or grieving, or poor in spirit. The ones who didn’t think they were worthy of anything, let alone heaven.

Heaven, as Jesus described it, wasn’t far off and untouchable. It was here. It was now.

It still is.

Which means maybe heaven isn’t just where we go when we die.

Maybe it’s what we wake up to when we finally start living.

What We Actually Long For

If I’m honest, the heaven I was taught to believe in never really connected with what I actually hoped for. It ticked the theological boxes, sure — no pain, no death, no sin. But it never touched the deeper ache. It didn’t stir anything in me. It didn’t feel like home.

Because what I long for isn’t an eternal worship service. It’s to be known. To be reunited. To be whole. To sit around a table with the people I’ve lost and laugh again. I want to see my kids as adults, whole and free and untouched by all the things I couldn’t shield them from. I want to sit by the ocean with no thought of time or work or pain. I want rest — not the kind that comes from sleep, but the kind that settles in your bones when the striving is over.

I want beauty that isn’t ruined by decay. I want joy that doesn’t feel like it’s on borrowed time. I want love that never has to say goodbye.

No that sounds like a Heaven I could live with.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

We try to name these longings in different ways — peace, reunion, healing, restoration — but underneath them all is a deep and holy ache. The sense that the world as it is… isn’t how it’s meant to be. And maybe heaven, in its truest sense, isn’t about escaping this world but about seeing it finally made right.

And if that’s what we really long for, then maybe Heaven is closer than we think.

Why Wait?

If heaven isn’t just where we go when we die — but something Jesus said is already breaking in — then the question isn’t “what happens when we get there,” but “what are we doing now?”

We’ve spent so much time imagining clouds and castles that we’ve missed what’s right in front of us. Jesus spoke of heaven in terms of restoration. Justice. Forgiveness. Shared meals. Lost people coming home. Not some perfect escape plan, but a broken world being made whole.

So maybe it’s time we stopped waiting around for heaven to arrive and started participating in it.

Love the people in front of you. Repair what you can. Pay attention. Say something kind that costs you something. Refuse to give up on the world just because it’s hard to look at.

You don’t need a sermon or a spiritual high. You just need to believe Jesus meant what he said.

The kingdom is already near. It’s already begun.

So, what can you do to create a little heaven today?

Start there.

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This post was previously published on Backyard Church.

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