7 Things You Didn’t Know About Heaven

A wonderful place!

“For a place we all dream of going to, it’s remarkable how little we actually know about heaven,” writes editor Alex Tresniowski. “There are no brochures touting its beauty, no travel videos on YouTube, no scenic photos on Facebook. All we have to go on are Biblical descriptions of a vast and shimmering place: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light,” John tells us in Revelation 22. And, we have the remembrances of people like Crystal McVea, an Oklahoma mother and schoolteacher who was revived after dying in a hospital and now describes her incredible experience in her new book, Waking Up In Heaven.

A wonderful place!

In Heaven, you cannot bow. “Well, what I mean is that in heaven we do not have our human forms. We are in our spirit forms. So we don’t have any arms and legs like we have here on earth. So I guess that, yeah, it would be kind of hard to bow without actually having a body. But the thing is, when I became aware that I was in the presence of God, I really did feel an overwhelming urge to bow and throw myself at His feet and just worship Him, and that is sort of what it felt like I did. And so in Waking Up In Heaven, I talk about my ‘complete surrender to His Greatness.’ So you can’t technically bow, but you do feel compelled to turn yourself over to God in every possible way.”

A wonderful place!

Heaven is almost impossible to describe. “I know this sounds funny because I just wrote a whole book about dying and going to heaven,” writes Crystal, “but I continue to be frustrated by how inadequate human words are to describe it. I mean, I always use words like brilliant and beautiful and amazing, but those are words that we might use to describe a movie or a painting or something. But heaven is just way, way, way more real and lucid and intense than anything we can experience on earth, so it’s understandable that we don’t really have the words to describe it. All I can do is try to convince you of how utterly magnificent heaven is, and then ask to you take what you’re picturing in your mind and multiply it by a million.”