Heaven won’t help you.

It’s a cry which many of us have made within the depths of our despair, the tear-stained anguish of our common sufferings, the malcontent boiling of our overwhelming dissatisfaction. “Heaven help me.” How’s that working for you?

Have you ever considered that there is a lesson, or maybe many lessons, which you cannot learn in heaven? As great as heaven is, as much as we long to be there, as glorious as all the worship about it offers us, we are all here on the tiny orbital rock in the vastness of a unimaginable universe to attend to a curriculum which can only be administered here, warts and all.

I know it’s hard to believe. But where do you think you are going to learn patience. Heaven can’t teach you this. It’s a realm where everybody is eternally basking in love. Time has no meaning there. Patience involves working within the restrictions of time.

You can’t have patience without also focusing on compassion. Who needs compassion in heaven when everyone is equal? When time is factored into patience, compassion must be administered when all demand their own schedule be followed. And in spite of how much you say you love people, slow moving folks require a level of compassion others just seem to drain from you particularly when they finally come into your field of vision.

These are just a few examples but there are many more. Most of them operate around the notion of time. Steadfastness, harmony and cooperation, tenderness, trustworthiness, commitment, and yes, even love, are lessons this life throws at you which must be taken over and over again until we pass the test. Heaven can’t help you because it put you in this school in the first place so that you would grow up.

There are far too many people who are trying to skip the tests with a note from home thinking they’ll still graduate the class. They fail to realize how the tests keep being administered but under different conditions. Yes, Virginia, life is a story problem and sometimes, when you least expect it, you’re on one of those two trains moving down the same track at two different speeds, and a quadratic equation is the only thing which is going to help you determine how your three children are going to get to different after-school events while you’re preparing dinner. Heaven has no idea the lessons we deal with sometimes simply because time is irrelevant in eternity. So how is your grade coming in this school called life?