I like to say that I made a friend, and my friend was the apostle Paul. I started reading Paul’s letters and started to see how Paul integrates things of eternity into every aspect of the Christian life. Not just, “This is what happens when you die,” but, “This is why you repent from sin, this is why you share the gospel, this is why we have hope, and this is why we’re content.” It was all heavenly realities. I don’t think that the heavenly mindedness that I experienced after my son’s death would’ve been sustained if I hadn’t started to study Paul’s theology of heaven and started to realize that any person should be heavenly minded and have a heavenward life just based on the basic fundamentals of our own salvation.

Citizens of Heaven
The beginning of this book really starts with the death of my son. Back on November 10th, 2013, my oldest child, Cam, talked about wanting to go see Jesus, and he asked all kinds of questions like, “Can we get in the car and go visit with Jesus?” And we told him that we wouldn’t see Jesus until we were in heaven. And so then he started to ask a bunch of questions about heaven. The conversation ultimately ended with him professing faith in Christ and acknowledging that Christ had died for his sins and that Christ was his Savior.
And so he then mysteriously and without explanation died that night. My child now was living in heaven. He was a three-year-old who had a profession of faith, and he was with the Lord above. And so my heart and my mind were with my child. And he lived in the full glory of God in heaven.
When I went to college at Wake Forest, my mom had previously never had any interest in Wake Forest. But now that her precious baby boy was at Wake Forest, she had the sweatshirt, she had the bumper sticker on the car, she checked the website, and she’d watch all the Wake Forest sports, because that’s where her child was. And so she now was interested in it, and it was on her mind.
Well, that was true for me with heaven, but even more so. And so I just had this new extremely magnified sense of heavenly mindedness that really was transforming my life in a positive way.
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The Lord blesses us with particular blessings of the future heavenly life during our time on earth. We come into union with Christ, which will be the bedrock of our heavenly joy. He declares the current, heavenly blessing of union with Christ in Colossians by saying, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Furthermore, Paul described the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as the present “guarantee” or “down payment” of the future communion with God in the heavenly life. As a result of all these new realities brought about by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, Paul lived with a foot in heaven and a toe on earth.

The Ever-Inspiring, Heavenward Life
When my oldest child died, I knew that my life would never be the same. In the initial months that followed, I expected that the change would be entirely negative. However, not all of the differences were painful. The Lord did something unexpectedly positive that has remained with me ten years later.
On November 10, 2013, my son lived in my house. On November 11, 2013, he lived in heaven above. Heaven was no longer an abstract, theological concept. It was now my son’s home.
Before this season, I would describe myself as a heavenly-minded person. I would think about heaven on nights when my head rested on the pillow but I could not still my mind for sleep. Heaven would be on my mind when I watched men carry a coffin down the aisle of the church at a funeral or at time when a loved one was nearing their final days. These were occasions when I would intentionally think about eternity.
However, after my son’s death, the Lord created a change in my mind, heart, and life that I would describe as a “heavenward shift.” God effectuated this turning both through the tragic circumstances of my son’s death but also through a critical new “friendship” that I made in the pages of Scripture.
I became consumed with heaven in a manner that eternity had a constant presence in my perspective in the routine matters of daily life. I missed attending a college reunion but found solace knowing that I’d have plenty of time with my believing friends in the new heaven and new earth. I’d forget to pay a bill and incur a late fee, something that would previously unravel me. Now I thought, “I won’t miss the $15 in eternity.” When I’d prepare a Bible study lesson or sermon, I would conceive of the lesson as an offering to place before the judgment seat of Christ at the second coming. This mindset brought more meaning, inspiration, and focus to lesson prep. During a hard season of life, the length of the struggles seemed shorter and more manageable with eternity as the backdrop of the trial. All of these realities were blessing me immensely and taking my spiritual life to new places.
I use the term heavenward to distinguish between heavenly-mindedness as compared to what I was experiencing. Heavenly-mindedness constitutes a spiritual discipline whereby we deliberately meditate on eternity (as God calls us to in Col. 3:1). On the other hand, I characterize heavenward as “a work of God in your life in which heaven becomes an organic part of your daily perspective and the object of your life’s direction.”
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One can view theological concepts as academic, arcane doctrine. Theology can seem so dry and lifeless at times. But theology breathes and becomes more than just information in a confession or textbook when it becomes the story of your life and when it constitutes bread in a desert.

Imagining the Worst
Like most people, my mind sometimes wanders to places of doom, to places where my imagination entertains (what I perceive to be) the Worst. In my adult life, I had made this mental journey enough times that my Worst had developed with vivid detail.
My Worst was likely the same as that of many parents: the persistent fear that my child would die. But my Worst had a second layer for me.
As a youth pastor, I worried that my faith did not possess enough fortitude. God had given me a relatively comfortable life. Any white American male like me, raised in an affluent, stable Christian family, for whom friendships, sports, school, and career had come easily, surely would believe that God is good. I feared that if my Worst occurred, I would lose my faith. I would turn my back on God and walk away from Christianity, and, consequently, my spiritual failure would shatter the faith of hundreds of students to whom I had proclaimed the promises of Christ for over a decade.
My Worst, indeed, entered my life as tragically as I ever imagined it could.
This book considers 12 life-giving truths that Christians can cling to in the midst of tragedy—truths that brought vital hope and comfort to the author when grieving the sudden loss of his 3-year-old son.
My Worst
On Sunday, November 10, 2013, finding my three-year-old son’s lost Lego ax prompted the most magical conversation of my life. After recovering his coveted toy, my three-year-old son, Cam, exclaimed, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”
Out of nowhere, my little boy started to ask serious spiritual questions. He asked if we could go see Jesus. When I explained that, while we couldn’t see him, Jesus is always with us, he asked if we could drive to see Jesus. After explaining to Cam that we would see Jesus when we got to heaven, my son turned his attention to heaven.
Cam asked if we would see Adam and Eve in heaven. He then declared, “I’m not gonna eat that apple.”
My wife and I reminded Cam that we all “eat the apple.” We reminded him that God sent Jesus because we all make the same mistake as Adam and Eve did: we all sin.
The conversation ended with my son saying, “Jesus died on cross. Jesus died my sins.” In the minutes following that sweet proclamation, my wife, Lauren, and I realized that we had witnessed the dearest dream of every Christian parent—our son had professed faith in Christ.
That night I went on a short, overnight campout with a leader and some students. I awoke on Monday, November 11, to three missed calls from my wife in the span of a minute. I then encountered a voice of terror.
My Worst had entered.
My wife pleaded for me to drive to the children’s hospital as soon as possible but offered no explanation. I pressed her for more information until she reluctantly delivered the worst news of my life: “Cam is dead.”
Lauren had found our perfectly healthy child lifeless in his bed. Paramedics were attempting to resuscitate him, but she assured me that it was futile. In what remains a medical mystery, our three-year-old child inexplicably died in his sleep, something that occurs to one in a hundred thousand children over the age of one. My child’s profession of faith was the last meaningful conversation I ever would have with him on earth. Our son’s life had ended in the blink of an eye.
The first half of my dreadful daydreams had become a reality. I had imagined this moment hundreds of times. Here was the point of departure between God and me. Here was that moment when my faith would crumble. In my imagination of doom, here was when I would curse God, resign from ministry, and pursue a life of self-interest as a bitter, faithless man.
But the Lord put a word in my mouth that surprised me. When Lauren delivered the tragic news, I said to her, “Lauren, Christ is risen from the dead. God is good. This doesn’t change that fact.” God gave me faith and hope while I stood squarely in the middle of my Worst.
The Narrative of Hope
That initial proclamation stood as the first of many moments of hopefulness as I discovered that God had been preparing me for such a tragedy during my entire life. Knowing that this day would come, God used lessons from Bible studies, conversations, theological reading, sermon podcasts, and previous trials to build a foundation that would stand when an overpowering wave of tragedy struck my life.
Throughout the journey of my worst nightmare—my descent into a dark, sad valley—the Holy Spirit would remind me of truths that comforted my soul and sustained my life. Very often in the month after Cam died, I would say to my wife or a friend that I could not conceive how anyone could survive such pain if they did not believe certain biblical principles.
How could a person survive if one did not know the gospel? How could one subsist if one did not accept the sovereignty of God? How would one function if one did not know the possibility of joy in suffering? How could one move forward without the hope of heaven?
There are some truths that mean nothing to a person who is gasping for existential air. When tears seem to flow continuously in your life, the nuances of the Trinity or the particulars of a certain end-times theory do nothing to comfort. However, other biblical concepts can walk a person back off the metaphorical or literal ledge when jumping seems so reasonable and appealing.
One night I sat down and wrote down all of these comforting theological principles as a personal creed. I began to realize that the Lord had embedded these individual truths in my heart that collectively constructed a narrative under which I could live during my Worst. This narrative gave me hope.
Gospel
The road ahead of me is long and painful, but Christ has defeated sin and death through the cross. I can face reality and make this journey, because on the other side of the cross is the resurrection. In the same way that Christ rose from the dead, so too can my life emerge from the darkness into light. The gospel tells me that I cannot redeem myself; only Christ can heal and free my heart. My only hope is to trust him to do so. My tragedy has not disrupted the narrative of my life. My story remains God’s story, and that is a story of redemption.
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