Imagine Heaven

How picture books and fantasy novels give me hope in redemption

I sat down with Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak to read to my children—for they were wild things who needed calming down. The friend on the loveseat across from me smiled. “Oh, I love that book. That book captivated me when my mother read it to me. It was the first book to make me wonder if I could travel to another land from my room just like the little boy did.”

It brought to mind an essay by Elizabeth Harwell, Enchanted Places:

I was fascinated by the thought of another more vibrant world existing independent of mine; I was also obsessed with figuring out how to get there. I looked for signs of passages everywhere: maybe behind that tree I spied in the backwoods on a walk with my mom, or perhaps there was an entry under my grandmother’s bed.¹

I remember a childhood friend telling me she truly believed she saw a portal open up in a tree while playing pretend in her backyard, and I believed her too. I felt desperate for magic as I played in my backyard waving crooked sticks around like wands and travelling across old wooden bridges in hopes of finding a place like Terabithia.

Though a believer from such an early age, I never made the connection that perhaps what I longed for was heaven itself—where all the magic, wonder, and hope of Narnia, Middle Earth, and Hogwarts originate from. Perhaps it’s because I imagined those places as much more fun than heaven could ever be. 

“Won’t we get bored in heaven, just singing to God all day?” I asked my closest Christian friend as we walked the school playground. 

“It’s heaven; we just won’t,” she said. 

I came to understand heaven as a place that brought joy and peace not because it was a place one would ordinarily find those things, but because it was heaven and it was just impossible to be sad there. If it weren’t for that unbreakable law of physics in heaven, we would be bored to tears. I imagined heaven as cartoons portrayed it: living in clouds, all dressed in white gowns, each singing with harps. It would be one big church choir.

I never understood why people said, “Jesus, come quickly!” I feared heaven would come too soon before I got to experience all the true joys of life and the afterlife: adulthood, college degrees, dream careers, marriage, and motherhood. I prayed from my canopied bed, “Jesus, don’t come too quickly.”

But what happens when all those supposed earthly joys lack the lustre fairytales, TV, and social media portrayed? 

Adulthood proved stressful, motherhood came with postpartum anxiety and depression and traumatic births and frightening diagnoses, and my husband walked away before the ten-year mark. I lay in bed wondering to myself if this is the life I told God to hold back heaven for so I could live it.

But did robotic, pre-programmed joy sound much better?

I had to reckon with my childish understanding of heaven and return to the child-like understanding. A place much more like the shores of the Undying Lands, Aslan’s Country, the Celestial City. It’s the fantastical, magical, fairy-stories that give me hope in heaven as they teach me to imagine what heaven truly is. 

The Spirit has in turn pulled my heart to Revelation. He showed me heaven is a place where tears simply don’t exist but are wiped away—wounds aren’t simply forbidden but are eternally mended. There’s a difference. One requires physics and perhaps distant, impersonal magic; the other requires a Magician and Storyteller. Heaven is where we look upon this broken earth, both its greatest joys and darkest sorrows, and we finally see the hand of God in all its clarity as he holds us in his unending embrace. Heaven is where these weakening, fragile bodies are strengthened and made new, not utterly eradicated so that we are mere spirits floating around in the clouds. Fairy-stories and Scripture teach me that. As Elizabeth continues in her essay,

When we read books to our children that speak of passages to other worlds, we prepare their imaginations to believe that beauty could be unfolding beyond what they can see. The world in Narnia was unfolding whether or not Lucy opened that wardrobe. The Wild Things were roaring their terrible roars before Max’s ears were there to hear them. Helping our children to imagine these worlds is a way to stretch their muscles of faith and to build bridges over the unexplainable.²

Maybe, just maybe, adults need these reminders too, to help our social media brains begin to reach the unexplainable. 

1.  Leslie Bustard, Carey Bustard, and Théa Rosenburg, eds., Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children (Baltimore, MD, United States of America: Square Halo Books, 2022), 63.

2. Ibid, 65.