SOME THINGS TO PONDER ABOUT AFTERLIFE

The following is taken from Hugh Nibley’s Book, Approaching Zion, beginning on page 409:

“Mountains and hills, great rivers and small streams, surely impart variety and beauty to the scene… Some students have complained that having to live on a Urim and Thummim, a sea of glass, no less, must be infinitely boring. How wrong they are! The face of the Urim and Thummim is no featureless flatland; rather, as Abraham found out, it can give you more dimensions than you can even imagine.

It is true, you have to exercise your mind in that environment, but where would you not wish to do that? If you want scented breezes over purple seas, the Urim and Thummim will gladly oblige; if it’s towering mountains you want, you can have them, too. Whatever it is you yearn to experience, that marvelous instrument can put you into the picture, if you only know how to operate it. This is not entirely (lacking in serious intent); after all, we have already anticipated the miracle in the device to which almost all Americans resort daily and nightly in order to retreat into other worlds, (the TV set).

So what (else) will we do (in the) forever? The movie studio imagines something like an eternal family reunion held in the city park with everybody sitting or standing around in old-fashioned nightgowns in an exchange of insipid smiles and small talk. After twenty minutes of that, anyone would settle for inferno.

If the question of what we will be doing in eternity stumps us, it should. That’s the whole point: if we knew the answer we’d have little enough to look forward to. The only way to know what fun lies ahead on the other side is to experience it, because as (the Apostle) Paul tells us, as long as we are here we can’t even begin to imagine what any of it is like: ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man…’ (1 Corinthians 2:9). No use trying to figure it out; you will just have to wait and see. And the gospel invites us to move toward the unknown."