Salvaged, Not Sorted
I’m pretty confident that heaven will be full of people who drive me nuts. Some of them will have theology that makes my eyes twitch.
Some will hold opinions I argued against, wrote books I scoffed at, and posted things I quietly muted for the sake of my sanity.
And yet there they’ll be.
I grew up around junkyards, which is maybe why I’ve always been skeptical of systems that claim to be airtight. Junkyards teach you that things don’t always work as the manuals suggest. Parts get swapped—and sometimes the wrong parts work just fine. Repairs get improvised, or not made at all, because the car keeps chugging along anyway.
Faith is like that.
We say we believe in grace, but we often live like heaven is a gated community for people who got the footnotes right. We act as if correct theology is the admission ticket, rather than a response to mercy already given.
Don’t get me wrong: I care about theology. Bad ideas about God tend to hurt people. Truth matters.
But somewhere along the way, many of us began confusing clarity with control. We turned faith into a sorting mechanism instead of a rescue operation.
Jesus, of course, never seemed very interested in that project.
He kept telling stories where about the wrong people, like workers being hired at the eleventh hour. Or prodigals who smelled like pigs. Or widows silently giving all they had.
Whatever and wherever heaven is, it won’t be populated by people who finally agree on everything. It will be populated by people who finally agree on Someone.
Which is deeply inconvenient for those of us who like our categories clean.
I suspect there will be folks in heaven who read the Bible more literally than I do, folks who read it less so, and folks who don’t read it at all. There will be people who spoke in ways that made me uncomfortable. People whose politics made my blood pressure spike. People who emphasized doctrines I thought were secondary and shrugged at ones I thought were essential.
And I suspect that, standing there, none of us will be especially interested in saying, “Well actually…”
In a junkyard, the miracle isn’t that a part was pristine. The miracle is that it was found, hauled out, cleaned up, and put back to work.
Grace does that to people. The people in heaven will be salvaged parts, just like in a junkyard.
So these days, when I feel the urge to draw sharper theological lines, to feel reassured by being “right,” to argue, I try to do two things:
- Imagine heaven as the final, glorious junkyard reclamation project.
- Shut the hell up.
My tongue tends to bleed more often that way, but that’s probably a good thing.