Teaching Kids About Heaven

We have spent the last couple of months learning and discussing our permanent home--Heaven! As one book states, Christopher Columbus had to do everything he could to learn about the place he would be venturing to. What was the soil like? Were there people living there? If so, were they hostile? Dangerous? What kind of weapons should we bring? How can we get there? How much money will it take? How many ships? How many people?

J.C. Ryle says, "It would be strange indeed if you did not desire information about your new abode. Now surely, if we hope to dwell for ever in that "better country, even a heavenly one," we ought to seek all the knowledge we can get about it. Before we go to our eternal home we should try to become acquainted with it."

One of the problems with not knowing about our heavenly home is the lies seen around us in the media about it. Why would someone want to go to heaven if they think it will be a boring place where we sit on clouds? Will it be this place we sit and endlessly sing repetitive songs to God that bore us? Our life reflects where we want to go and if we don't feel like heaven is a good place to go, our life will be guided by those thoughts.

Do you know how to answer your child's questions about heaven? Will there be sports there? Will we invent? Will we work all day long? Will we have bodies? Will we live in our own house or in a shared house?

To answer these questions and learn as much as we can about heaven, we looked to one of my favorite authors--Randy Alcorn. A very dear friend once bought me his 500-page book "Heaven" that answers pretty much every question you could think of about heaven using Scripture as its reference point. Of course, we can't know everything, but if the Bible says anything about it, Randy Alcorn talks about it in this book.

The children's version of this book, Heaven for Kids, was one of the books we read. However, we started with his book, "Tell Me About Heaven" as an introduction to begin our learning.

In both books, he discusses the galaxy of Andromeda. So, to finish off our study, we are learning about Andromeda. Here's a brief video that gave us some starting information:

For the rest of the information, we got books about Andromeda from the library.

So the next time someone says, "We can't begin to imagine what Heaven will be like," your children will be able to tell them, "I can!"