Moral of the story: get pumped about heaven

I know my post last week was about The Hedge, but there are a few other ideas that I've been thinking about that might make more sense to me if I put them in writing. I understand that the reading was not necessarily a Christian allegory, but for my purposes, it will be.

The question we were asked at the end of class is really what got me thinking about this idea. "Would you be happy on the other side of the hedge?" When I first thought about this, my answer was indefinitely yes. However, if I get down to some of the details about that situation, my answer becomes a little foggy.

The garden, in this case representative of the garden of eden or of heaven, was characterized more than anything by its lack of progress or even purpose. The road began in the garden and ended in it, and was seen as altogether pointless because of that. However, there are several questions I began to struggle with when I thought about if I would be happy in the garden or not. Its true that in the garden, all the struggle, pain, and hardship of striving to progress would not exist, but is that because it is a better place or simply because those within do not strive for such ends?

To answer this, I think that both are true. Because of that, I think an interesting perspective to take on this reading was that Forster was making an allegory about the human perception of heaven. As Christians, we sometimes doubt that heaven will be all it's made out to be. We see this possibility of the rest of eternity spent with God, and, I'm ashamed to admit, we can only focus on the fact that its just a really long time and that anything, no matter how amazing, can get old after too long.

I know that sounds really bad so I'll try and wrap this up. Like I said when talking about Heidegger, I think our problem is our perception. We are only humans and thus can only grasp things within our understanding. It would make sense then, that a concept like an eternity with and infinitely loving and wise God would be far beyond our understanding. This sounds almost like a cop-out, but I believe we sometimes doubt whether or not we would like it on the other side of the hedge, or whether heaven will be that great, simply because we truly can't comprehend the possibility that it will be infinitely greater than anything we could imagine. Knowing that, the whole argument pretty much becomes moot. Once we get to the other side of the hedge, we'll know what we've been missing, and God will have been right all along.

ps i commented on Amanda's