After a wonderful conversation filled with humor and sweet memories, we sat quietly for a moment. Then, as he looked out the window, he asked, “Do you think there will be those beautiful flowers in heaven?”
It is such a simple question, and yet it holds within it a lifetime of beauty noticed, of love given and received, of a world that has, at times, been enough.
Less than a week later, I stood there as his memorial service was about to begin. Quietly to myself I said, “I sure hope you have found those beautiful flowers in heaven.”
Countless times I have been asked similar questions, each shaped by the particular loves of a life. The gardener wonders about flowers. The musician imagines sound. The cyclist hopes for endless roads.
C. S. Lewis once wrote that our deepest longings are not illusions, but signposts. Echoes of something real, something ahead of us. If that is true, then the beauty we have known here is not the end of the story, but the beginning of it.
Perhaps that is where we begin. Not with certainty, but with longing. Not with a map of heaven, but with the quiet, persistent hope that what we have loved most deeply here will not be lost but instead be gathered, healed, and made whole in what lies beyond.
Because beneath the question is something deeper still: a trust that what has brought us joy here is not accidental, not disposable, not destined simply to fade into nothing. A hope that the God who imagined such joy into being does not abandon it at the edge of death.
And then the memorial service begins.
We stand. The room quiets. And the ancient words rise. Steady, familiar, and full of hope. From the Book of Common Prayer:
“I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord;
whoever has faith in me shall have life, even though he die.”
Not a description of heaven.
Not an answer to every question.
A promise.
A promise that whatever heaven holds, flowers or something more, it is held in the One who is Life itself.
And for now, that is enough.
BP