Questions for Heaven

"I guess in Heaven I'll learn
I'll be waiting my turn
To ask about quasars and feathers
I hope the line isn't long
I hope Your patience is strong
It's a good thing forever's forever"
-Questions for Heaven, Chris Rice

I haven't posted in a while, mostly because I've been on Summer vacation. My classes start on Monday, and I'm sure I'll have a lot of material to share then. But for now, I wanted to share a little experience of mine.

In my kittypix community, there was a famous kitty named Dusky. Famous because we all knew him by name. Dusky was a newborn kitten, abandoned by his feral momma and adopted by a pair of good samaritan humans. Kimberly and Amanda worked day and night to keep Dusky fed and when he got sick and had to go into the vet, they continued to go in every couple of hours to feed him while keeping him on oxygen. It cost lots of money as well as time and effort. But he recovered. He finally got to come home to Kimberly and he was almost off of oxygen and was looking so much better. Meanwhile, we rooted and cheered for the little guy on kittypix, basking in the multitude of pictures that Kimberly posted. He was our little hero.

And then, suddenly, he was gone. He was at the vet's and in 30 minutes, he went from fine to... gone.

Kimberly was crushed, and so were we all. I was a wreck for several days, and I have amazing friends that were here to help me through it. Now, weeks later, I have finally gotten the courage to talk about what I learned from that experience, in an e-mail to one of those close friends:


I've been doing a lot of thinking about Dusky. He's the kitten who died a few weeks back when I got really upset. The thing is, part of the reason that I was upset was that he was doing so well, and everyone was so excited and then he was just gone. It was like God had given him a challenge and the girls worked so hard and he got better and God gave everyone hope that he'd be fine, and then God just took him away. Kimberly (Dusky's foster mom) was crushed. And the other reason that I was upset is that when my sister found out, she pointed out that the mother had abandoned Dusky and a mother knows. And that pissed me off because, even though I know she's right (in nature, mothers can tell when one baby isn't likely to survive), it just... I mean, it was like, does that mean that we should just let someone die, "Oh, he's predestined to die, so we shouldn't ever bother trying to heal him." I'm sorry, but that's bull shit! God wouldn't punish someone for trying to give someone else a chance to live. So, yeah...

Anyway, this morning, something occurred to me on the way to work. I know when you face these hard questions, the response is almost always either, "You just have to accept that God has His reasons," or "We can never know the answer." But when a question is really important to you, those are not easy answers to swallow... And the truth is, I don't think they should be. Because as God's children, we SHOULD be truth seekers. And part of seeking the truth is asking questions.

Which is what led me to my realization this morning. This realization is that when I get to heaven, I am going to ask God why he took Dusky. Does that seem kind of petty and silly? Perhaps. But... The difference is subtle. It's like... I realized that I could ask questions and still trust God to know the answers, while at the same time accepting that I cannot comprehend the answers RIGHT NOW. But someday... Someday I'll see the whole picture.

I think this is a concept that I'll use when I start my practice as a Christian Counselor. There's a subtle but powerful difference between just saying, "I can never know the answer to my questions," and writing a journal of "all the questions I will ask God when I get to heaven." If the questions are important enough to us, we should not be afraid to ask them, even if we know the answer will be long coming.

So, yeah, sorry for that tangent. The reason for all of this is that when I got to work, after coming to this realization, I found that Kimberly had made an update on kitypix. Apparently, she and Amanda and several others have gone out to track down Dusky's littermates. They've found Dusky's littermates, but can't get to them yet. But they also found another little of kittens of a feral momma and brought them home so that they can have happy lives of petting and loving and sleeping on laps.

Is that why God took Dusky? So that half a dozen other kittens would get a chance to live the same life? I don't know. It's possible. Wouldn't Kimberly and Amanda have gone back for the other kittens anyway? I'd like to think so. But would Kimberly have been as determined (she spent 3 days of searching) if she hadn't just lost Dusky? I don't know. But... It's something to think about. At any rate, yeah, Dusky is on my list of things that I want to ask God about when I get to heaven.