This past week, we were blessed to have our 2 daughters and their significant others visit us. This included my grandson. Our time together was certainly one for the scrapbook of our lives, but the sad aspect of it is that our delightful time together had to come to an end. Unfortunately, we had to end the visit with tearful goodbyes, which are definitely terrible. I’m grateful for the blessing of our time together, but now I’m sad that it ended too quickly.

After dropping our older daughter and grandson off at the airport this morning, I turned to the Bible for consolation. This verse came to my mind:

The good news that my Good Shepherd is always with me and will never leave nor forsake me–so I’ll never have to say goodbye to Him–gave me comfort for sure, but it didn’t alleviate my sadness as much as I had hoped.

So then I started wondering if we would ever get to a time when we no longer have to say goodbye to loved ones. The only time I could speculate about was once we are all in heaven, which unfortunately will be after even more painful goodbyes than what we went through with the departure of our daughters.

Even then, I’m not sure that there won’t tearful goodbyes in heaven. I mean, for my wife and me, our ideal heaven would include having our 3 kids and their families living in our neighborhood, but what if that’s not the case for them? What if heaven for us means that we have the mountains on one side of our neighborhood and the beach on the other side, but that’s not their idea of heaven?

The Bible surprisingly does not speak much about heaven, so we are left to wonder and, to some extent, fantasize about it. Maybe heaven will be so awesome that everyone will lead the life of their dreams together, even if their dreams are different. So even if it’s not what heaven looks like for my loved ones, perhaps we will get to experience eternity not only with Jesus living on our block, but also in close proximity to our loved ones from many generations past and future, What if, in this way, we’ll never have to say goodbye again?

We can always hope, right?