Last week we were on a zoom call – that is a video conference. It is a really good experience in many ways – unless of course, it’s four hours long…that’s too much.

There were about 30 people on the call and we were being divided into about 6 groups for different discussion items. So you would see all 30 people then suddenly the screen would change and you would enter a “room” where just 5 or 6 of us could see and talk to each other from wherever we were. After 15 or 20 minutes suddenly and without any control on our part, we would be swept back into the larger group.

The result of this was that those five people would disappear suddenly, the screen would go blank for just a second, and then “poof” all these faces are staring back at you.

I wondered aloud, causing some laughter, is that what it is like to die and enter heaven?

Do we close our eyes and almost instantaneously we see familiar faces? Will everyone be smiling and happy to see our arrival?

I think we may well discover that in God’s great goodness it will be the familiar faces that we see first. Does that make any sense? Now don’t get upset, I’m not saying Jesus won’t be there (“Hi Fred, Jesus is just held up in a meeting but he’s coming!”. No, I do think that we’ll be aware of the goodness and grace of God, I think we’ll be aware of angelic beings but I also think people will be there to welcome us with joy.

It’s just a thought – it doesn’t have a Biblical text to back it up, though there are plenty of references to family, to the “great cloud of witnesses” who have gone before and so – maybe I’m not far off.

With the announcement of the promotion to glory of Lt Colonel Junior Hynes maybe my thoughts around heaven have been more lately. He was far too young to be taken from our perspective. But he’s free of pain and sorrow and fully all that Junior ever could be.