What is Heaven?

Someone once said to me that the idea of heaven holds no attraction to him. He pictured it as floating around in the clouds kind of doing nothing. I replied that heaven is unimaginable, so how could we know whether it's attractive or not? An idea came to me as I prayed about and pondered the question more deeply.

Here's the idea...
It is that the experience of heaven, in general, possesses two qualities. The first is the absence of negatives. By "negatives", I mean things that all humans avoid, such as misery, despair, sadness, pain, and grief. The Bible backs this up. It tells us there will be no more suffering and no more death.

The second is the presence of positives. It gets a little tricky, though, to identify these. Humans greatly value certain experiences. Experiences of love, beauty, friendship, family, wealth are some... the list goes on. Think of anything that people tend to cherish and add it to the list. I believe that all of these things are just shadows of the their fulfillment in heaven. 

I believe that every longing of the human heart is, ultimately, a longing for a reality that can be found only in the experience of God's presence. Although our desires are rooted there, in our corrupted condition, we look for their ultimate fulfillment in things like financial wealth, or health, or happy families (as examples). We pursue those things as though they are ULTIMATE goods. But they aren't ultimate goods...they're goods that POINT to ultimate good.

Heaven is where the experience of the full reality of love, beauty, friendship, family, and wealth (the list goes on) is found. This full reality will be experienced when one enters into unfettered fellowship with God Himself. He is the Source and "Author" of all these realities. They find their source in Him because He embodies them. In other words, God didn't "think up" this concept of love, and then insert it into the creation. Love is intrinsically part of God's nature. The bible says that God is love so, because we people are created in His image, because we are like God, the idea of love is necessarily a part of our consciousness. We long for love and continually try to find it in one way or another in our experience.

I believe that, only when a person experiences full fellowship and interaction with God (in heaven) will that person have found everything they've ever longed for fulfilled in the deepest and truest sense of the word "fulfilled".
When one has experienced the beauty, love, friendship, and wealth that is realized by being with God face to face, then, and only then, will what was meant by the words "love", "family", "wealth", and "beauty" be fully and finally realized. Then, and only then, will it finally and fully be known what was meant by the word "home", because we will finally have come to our true home. When we are face to face with God, we will finally know the full meaning of "friend". Those who experience the heaven of God's full presence, will look no further. Their search will have come to its End. It will be unimaginably wonderful and fill our eternity with discoveries of wonder after wonder. But, as I said, it IS unimaginable.

Paul touched it once. He had a taste, and the taste was too much to speak of. I have a feeling he wasn't "permitted" to speak of it, at least in part, because there were no human words that could describe it.

When all is said and done, what's the answer to the question, "What is heaven?" Heaven is being in the presence of God.