Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with timbrel and harp (Psalm 149:3, NIV)

A Planned Trip

I watched as the Statue of Liberty glided past the window of our state room on the Jewel of the Seas, snapping a couple of photos with my I-phone to send to our kids before we lost internet service. After months of planning and teaching additional classes to pay for the passage, my husband and I were finally taking the cruise to Bermuda we’d hoped to take for our 25th wedding anniversary, a trip that was indefinitely postponed by Ron’s car accident that year. When the packet from Royal Caribbean had arrived the previous  week with our reservations, list of activities, luggage tags, and a colorful map of the island, I was ecstatic, feeling as if I had won Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket!

“What shall we do first?” I asked Ron as I turned away from the window. I pulled the colorful brochure out of my handbag, ready to explore all the luxuries this ship had to offer. But my husband, exhausted from the shuttle trip up from Philadelphia and the long wait to embark, had fallen asleep on the bed. Quietly, I walked across the small room, folded up his walker, and slid it to the side of the bed. We were finally here, on a trip to paradise, but the injuries that continued to plague Ron would certainly limit his activities. It wouldn’t really be paradise for him.

His Paradise would come later.

The Ticket to Ride

This past Sunday, April 24, Cliff Werline spoke of the many reasons we as Christians have to be joyful, not the least of which is the reality of eternal life that awaits us when we exit this mortal world. We should, Cliff advised us, “fix our hearts on eternal life” because we have the ticket to take us there. And that ultimate Paradise offers much more to us than a bounty of pineapples and turquoise waters.

While it’s true we’re not exactly sure what life will be like in Heaven, we do know that “our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,  who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body”  (Philippians 3:20-21). We’ll never get tired, never get hungry, never be cold. In addition, if our bodies are indeed to be made like the body of Jesus, there might be other things we can look forward to doing in Heaven that we can’t do here.

Flying? Why not? Acts 1: 3-10 describes how Jesus “was taken up before their eyes, and a cloud hid Him from sight”  when He left earth to return to Heaven. Walking through walls? Well, Jesus did when the disciples were in a locked room and “Jesus came and stood among them” (John 20:19). Run fast enough to not sink into the ocean? Both Jesus and Peter did in Matthew 14:22-29. How about teleportation? Acts 8:38-40 tells us that when Philip was ministering to the eunuch,

 “ the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away”. 

Most importantly, our “dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die” (I Corinthians 15:53). And there would, I have absolutely no doubt, be dancing in our praise to God. 

Ron had always loved to dance.

The True Paradise

Despite Ron’s physical limitations, we enjoyed our one and only cruise. It was a time away from hospitals and doctors, surgeries and medical appointments. Even if I needed to push Ron in a borrowed wheelchair around the paved paths on the white-sanded beaches, we were still able to enjoy gorgeous sunsets and time together in the paradise of Bermuda.

I like to think now of Ron in the true Paradise, his body no longer failing him. The wheelchair and the walker have been left here on earth; he has no need of them in Heaven because, “we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands” (2 Corinthians 5:1). Can he fly? Can he teleport? Maybe.

What I am certain of is this: freed from his illnesses in body and mind, he is undoubtedly dancing.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

And so can you.