Doug and I had a rather lively discussion about heaven on Friday. I’m not quite sure what started it.

Wait, yes I am. I’d had another dream about living with the Osbournes. As in, Ozzy Osbourne. (Doug jokingly comments that most people would be disturbed by a dream like that!)

The dream was still kind of hovering over me, and I commented that I was supposed to be born into a “wealthy family who loves each other.” There was a pregnant pause, and then Doug answers, “Yes, you were.”

So now I’m frustrated and want to know just what the big deal is over heaven. What I’ve always imagined heaven to be like is that we’re unfinished here on earth, and when we get to heaven, we’re complete. Not that we know everything, but that we don’t have to deal with sin, so everything is good.

It sounds boring to me.

On earth, we have a yin and a yang. Bad and good. We can appreciate the good because we know the bad. How will we know and appreciate the good if there’s no bad?

Doug contends that we’ll have our memories intact, but we won’t know the shame and embarrassment that is attached to them. The confusion, frustration, with everything we’ve had to deal with on earth will be wiped away. The good will be better than good.

Apparently, in one way of looking at it, the ulterior motives I assign to every male on the planet will no longer exist. My suspicion of people will be gone, because there will be no need for it. So when people look at me, they’ll see the beauty and the love without question.

I will also be able to see that in them.

I still have a hard time trusting people. It’s been nearly three years since my journey into the most hellish and beautiful time in my life, but it still colors certain things about me - certain ways I see people. In heaven, I will be able to see the beauty and lose the mistrust.

I could definitely live with that.

I suppose I’ve always thought of heaven as kind of an oatmeal-colored existence. Doug says the trouble with much of the Christian society’s views on heaven is that we’ll sit around singing “Kumbayah” for eternity. My thought is, when the streets are made of gold, why do I keep thinking that we will be sitting around singing “Kumbayah”? Why would we then need streets of gold?

Last night I had an awful dream. That’s how I characterized it in an e-mail to Jen. It was only awful because I had to wake up and again deal with the fact that life is not like my dream.

Through a referral from a client I’d met a man who was wonderful. He was beautiful, but not just on the outside. He had kind eyes. That’s a hard thing to come by. Mike (the boy from way-back-when) had mischievous eyes. Max had compelling eyes. Neither of them had kind eyes. This man had kind eyes. He was exciting and boring all at the same time. He had a life, a job, a home, and all the boring necessities of (my) life. He was also achingly beautiful and sexy.

And he loved me. It was easy to see. He didn’t (just) want to sleep with me, he didn’t want to use me for what I could give to him. He didn’t want to live vicariously through me. I didn’t want to change anything about him, and strangely, he didn’t want to change me.

I guess what I felt was cherished. Maybe for the first time in my life I understood what that actually felt like.

I remember everything about the dream. I remember what he smelled like. I remember the color of the carpeting in his living room and how the sun felt on my face when I stood on his deck. I remember the sounds of his car driving away as I stood smiling at him. I remember the plants inside his house, and the feel of the berber carpeting on my back in the sunroom.

I slept until noon. I didn’t want to wake up.

We were together all our lives, and died together. We were in heaven together, and heaven didn’t seem any different than our life together on earth.

This dream has made me mope throughout the day. Life outside of the dream is very different. It’s not bad by any stretch, but it’s not heaven either. There’s still conflict and hurt and stress. I suppose that’s something that would still exist, even inside the world I’d created in my dream. But there’s something there that offsets it - overwhelms the bad.

I’ve never had a time before when I was so ready to have a healthy relationship. For the first time in my life I’d like to meet a man who is exciting and boring. Someone I’m not needing to fix or needing to have fix me. I know he’s out there somewhere, and I just haven’t met him yet. I don’t know if he’ll sweep me off my feet, or we’ll just grow into something like my dream. I do know, however, that God created us to have a partner, and I’m hopeful.

Waiting for rainbow-colored oatmeal,

michelle