In Christian ministry, death is often imaged as a passageway leading from this world to the next, or a bridge uniting modes of existence, or a gateway through which we step from the mortal into the eternal. These are all perfectly appropriate images, but it’s important to emphasize the continuity they represent, rather than the supposed elevation.

What passes over the bridge is the essence who we are. What emerges on the far side of the door is recognizably the same personality as the one who entered from the near side. Far from turning us into saints or angels, death doesn’t even improve us. Death is transportation, not transformation. Who we are here and now is what we will be there and then; what is changed is just the nature of the world in which we find ourselves.

But what a change that will be!

When God first refused Israel entry into the Promised Land and sent the nation back into the wilderness, it wasn’t to gain time in order to accommodate the Promised Land to them: it was to cultivate a new Israel, an Israel that could flourish in what the Promised Land had to offer.

As we approach Heaven, may we profit from our own sojourn in the wilderness.