Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. We are currently exploring some of our favorite Bible verses and how they've changed our lives.

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Before becoming a Christian, I found the idea of going to heaven, how should I put it, unappealing.

Playing harps as a disembodied soul during an eternal worship service in the sky,

it just seemed kind of boring. I'm not sure where I got

this idea of heaven from, probably Looney Tunes or All Dogs to go to heaven, but I'm

sure I'm not alone in my personal heavenly vision. I'm sure because there is so much

evangelical popular art depicting Jesus in that exact way. He's standing at the

pearly gates in some location where a dude went way too hard with a smoke machine.

So can I be honest?

I found the idea of heaven boring even after I became a Christian.

I mean, it's obviously boring before I became a Christian but even after I loved Jesus and I knew that I wanted to be with him forever I still found this concept of heaven boring. I mean isn't variety the spice of life do I really want to be

doing the same thing day in and day out? Everything changed for me when I was 20 and I heard a

speaker at a conference say in a somewhat off-handed way, I can't wait to read the next Jane Austin novel.

Now at the time I was an English major so the idea of reading in heaven, not just harping, well that was a cake I could not pass on.

And then I realized that there was something even better.

This guy he seemed to be implying that some people, or least Jane Austin would actually be writing in heaven,

creating culture in heaven. There'd be pens, there'd be paper, and of course I'm sitting there

thinking how in the world is a soul going to do that?

...