Today Audrey would have been 4-months-old. I was privileged to meet and hold my 6-month-old baby niece and my 8-month-old baby cousin for the first time this week. Both baby girls are barely more than a couple pounds bigger than Audrey was at birth. It makes me wonder what Audrey would have been like today. Would she have been bigger than her baby cousins? How long or how dark would her hair have gotten? Would she have given up that silly habit of keeping her arms raised up to her face? Would her cries have been loud? Would she have a laugh yet that is contagious? Today I can’t help but imagine what she would have been like.

However, I’m also overwhelmed with thoughts of what she is like.  Up there in Heaven with a new body and a perfect body: does she still look like a precious little baby or is she grown-up, looking ever more like her mother? I’m sure that voice that she never had on earth she now has in Heaven and uses daily to praise God. Does Heaven still feel new and overwhelming to her or does she feel completely at home and at rest with God as though she has already been there four-thousand years? Probably a mix of both. Oh and to wonder who she has met up there.

Like in a letter Emily wrote to Audrey, I wonder too: “Have you seen the sea of glass?”  I wish so much we could get a letter back from her. I wish I could have her describe just how perfect and serene it is. Oh how I want to know the reality of these things so much. But as little as I know of what it really will be like, I love how Audrey has made the reality of Heaven that much more real to me now. I find my thoughts now far more often where they should be: on my eternal destination. And though I can only imagine what it is going to be like, it is that very imagining that has made my faith stronger. For “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Let me encourage us all then, as Paul did in Colossians 3, to “set your minds on things above… [for] when Christ, who is your life, appears, then you will also appear with him in glory.” What a privilege and what a blessing! We are not just going to survive in an after-life, but we are going to be with Him in glory!

Keeping Faith,

Justin