It’s a great teachable moment when your children or grandchildren ask about heaven and spiritual things, and though they won’t fully understand everything, telling them what the Bible says will sow seeds of truth that can bear beautiful fruit in the future when they need it! 

One child asked her grandpa, “Are you going to heaven today?” What follows are some thoughts on how grandpa might rightly answer his little granddaughter.

You might start by helping your child understand heaven and spiritual things versus physical things:

“Heaven is a place that we can’t see right now where God lives with His angels and people who love Him but have died. God is Spirit, which means He’s invisible to our eyes, even though we can see what He does in the world, a little like how we can see wind moving things but can’t see the wind. And we are spirits too—the real us, the part that knows things and loves people and can love God. We just live in these bodies for now.”

Then it’s easier to address the idea of going to heaven:

“These bodies eventually get old and die, and but the real us, our spirits, keep living, and they go to be with God like a bird flying away into the sky. That’s when we get to heaven, where God is, and that’s how we see Him. We never know when God is going to take us to heaven, but we can know that we will be with Him forever then without any pain or crying.”

And we can share our hope:

“But one day Jesus promises He is going to come back for all of us and completely defeat evil and the Devil. When He does, He is going to make a new heaven and a new earth where there is nothing bad anymore. We will see Him in His body, and He’ll give us new bodies too, much better, special ones! Then we can be with Him always with lots of joy.”