Imagine If Eternity Felt Like a Natural Transition

Several years ago, I read a book by John Ortberg titled Soul Keeping. Near the end, John tells the story of his friend and mentor, Dallas Willard. As someone near the end of his life, Dallas was going through a series of health complications that made each new day more difficult than the one before. Life was hard, and conversations couldn’t help but drift to talk of death and eternity.

As they chatted, Dallas made a comment that took John off-guard. “I think that, when I die,” he said, “it may take some time before I know it.”[1] John wasn’t sure how to respond, but Dallas went on to make the following profound statement:

A person, Dallas said, is essentially a collection of conscious experiences. Far more than just bodies or just appetites, we are our experiences. That’s why we treasure the good ones so — a beautiful sunset, a favorite scene in a movie, a first kiss, a dramatic victory. This conscious experience of life, Dallas said, will go right on uninterrupted by death. Jesus put it so strikingly: “The one who trusts in me will never taste death.”[2]

To Dallas, there wasn’t this grand divide between this life and the next. There was interconnection and this sense that God was using his time on earth to prepare him for the life to come. This gave each moment, each test of character, and each wonderful high or terrible low tremendous meaning.

God wasn’t an abstract concept. He was knowable, personal, and relatable. Thus, the afterlife would be a natural transition from one experience to the next.

I’ve often thought of Dallas’ words because they directly oppose how many live and how my mind naturally operates. Just the idea of knowing God at this level is thought to be either arrogant or foolish. But if it is true, our greatest desire in life should be to have a relationship with him so strong that eternity feels like a natural transition.

So, Is It Even Possible to Know God at This Level?

Jesus demonstrated that it was and is. He said in John 17:3, “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent —Jesus Christ.”

This love Christ wants us to have is relational, not slave-driven. It’s intimate, not distant. It’s available, not unattainable. It’s liberating, not constraining. It’s life-giving, not rules-oriented.

Sunday Christians approach God out of a sense of unhealthy obligation, hoping to ease their guilty conscience and help others think better of them. Monday Christians see God as a being to be pursued, worshiped, and befriended.

Our primary duty in life is not to live like the Preacher of Ecclesiastes and climb the ladder of success. Instead, our primary goal is to know God. It’s to sit with him, spend time with him, and converse with him.

This week, I was reading Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Formation, when I stumbled across this wonderful line. He writes, “The world says, ‘If you are not making good use of your time, you are useless.’ Jesus says: ‘Come spend some useless time with me.’”[3]