“Life is a dream, and heaven’s reality.” For so many of the people Jan and I encourage, these are not just lyrics to a popular Christian song, they are an anchor. That’s why we felt compelled to do an issue on heaven. It’s a subject close to our hearts. It is the hope of every soul.

But I have to tell you, the reality of that hope didn’t come easily to me. When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I was scared. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to leave my wife and kids behind. Even though I was a Christian, I felt tremendous fear and anxiety.

I am not alone in the fear I felt when I faced death. Something deep within us tells us that death is not natural. We fight against it as if it is a foreign enemy, and in a sense it is. The Bible tells us that God has placed eternity into the heart of every person. In Ecclesiastes 3:11 we read that God “has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done.” We long for life to go on, yet we are so attached to life on earth that we resist heaven, the true home Jesus has prepared for us.

So we struggle. On one hand we are scared, on the other hand there is heaven. We wrestle back and forth between the two. That is what happened to me. My feelings and beliefs wrestled within me. The apostle Paul’s phrase “to live is Christ and to die is gain,” which refers to the hope of heaven, kept going through my mind. I knew I would go to heaven, yet I couldn’t honestly repeat Paul’s words from my own heart. Death, even if it took me to heaven, didn’t seem like “gain” to me.
Yet the underlying truth of Paul’s statement held onto me and said, “Dave, you’re a child of God. Heaven is a very real place. It is the place you will go to if you die.” And when we face death, when we face the loss of loved ones, we desperately need a rock-solid hope. Jan describes our need for hope best: “The thought that this is all there is—we live and we die—was dreadful. When you realize how fragile life is, you search hard for the truth. You have to know what is real. You need a hope beyond this life.”

Heaven provides that hope for us and for many, many others. The reality of heaven doesn’t take away the pain of our suffering or our losses, but it assures us that our pain is temporary. Our heart and prayer is that the words and images in this issue will lift your eyes toward heaven, our eternal home.

Tells the story of the depression, burnout, stress, and suffering that Dave and Jan endured after Dave's retirement from baseball and the amputation of his pitching arm. Dave and Jan shar (more...)