Longing for Eternity

Dannah Gresh: Since receiving her cancer diagnosis, Colleen Chao has been determined to serve others as much as possible. But sometimes she is struck by a sense of impending loss. Like the time she checked into a hotel by herself and watched her family pull away.

Colleen Chao: Yes, when I was writing In the Hands of a Fiercely Tender God, I did a little writer’s retreat. I was hopped up on chemo and just not getting the book done. I was struggling. I was distracted at home, and so I went for two nights at a hotel. Eddie and Jeremy dropped me off. They walked out, and I could see the parking lot from my window, so I went over to watch them and to wave at them.

And I tell you, watching them walk to the car and waving at them, there was this hit on my heart that I did not even know how to process. This little goodbye from a hotel room window represented something too much for me to absorb or process in that moment. What it represented was cruel. It was a cruel moment.

And then, as God faithfully does, I just felt God with me. Like: He’s got them. He’s got me. He’s in the goodbyes—the short ones, the long ones. He’s there with us, and He cares for them, and He’s going to take care of them. And then He gives more time.

I have been shocked at the amount of time. I’m flabbergasted at the more time. I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. When I got that diagnosis, I thought, I’ll never have hair again. I’m just going to wither away and die. That’s what I was all prepped for. My Type-A personality was getting everything lined up.

And here we are over four years later, and I think, This is a gift beyond anything I could have fathomed. It’s amazing. It’s come at a high cost. The weariness, the exhaustion is pretty crazy. And the pain and complexities, but it is a precious gift. I’ll find myself stopping and going, “Lord, this thing has been a good adventure.”

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, coauthor of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story for September 30, 2025. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Dannah, what are you most looking forward to about heaven?

Dannah: Oh, I have long said that after I meet Jesus, I want to meet Mrs. Noah, to know how she kept all of the animals alive. But that’s just really me saying that I can’t wait to have conversations with people who I feel like I know because I’ve read about them in Scripture so many times. How about you?

Nancy: Oh, Dannah, there’s so many biblical characters that I’ve taught about and loved over the years. I’m eager to meet all of them, but I’m mostly looking forward to being with Jesus and worshipping Him with that great host of saints in heaven.

One thing I do know: Life in heaven won’t be boring. We won’t be sitting in the clouds strumming a harp, wishing for something more interesting to do. And that’s why I so appreciate writers like Colleen Chao who awaken in us a longing to be with Jesus for all eternity.

Colleen has a brand new book called On Our Way Home: Reflections on Heaven in the Face of Death.

Colleen has been living with a terminal cancer diagnosis for about four years. She’s been through countless treatments and pain and physical suffering. It’s been a hard, hard journey. But I’ve watched over those years as she’s savored every day and prayed that it would please the Lord that she could have more time on earth to care for the people she loves.

But she also has a sense now that heaven is near. In her book On Our Way Home, Colleen shares a series of short vignettes, and for the rest of the program, she’s going to talk through some of them.

She’ll also be sharing material from her book In the Hands of a Fiercely Tender God.

Let’s listen, and may the Lord awaken in us a desire to see Him face to face and live with Him and His people forever.

Colleen: So I grew up in a special kind of land. I love talking about where I grew up . . . San Bernardino. I mean, we have drug busts on our street. We have the SWAT team shutting down the street. My mom’s making cinnamon rolls for them. They’re sitting at our dining table talking with my dad. So I think the blessing in that is realizing how broken this land is.

I think sometimes we can be protected from that in our little suburbia life, just how broken their land is and how deeply their land groans. It says, “the earth groans under the weight of sin” in Romans. And so I got to see that tangibly, like it was not safe. That stirred up those longings for something better. When you’re in that kind of setting, it toughens you up, but it also makes you go, “This is not where I’m made to live. This is not where I long for.”

But I’m grateful for the contrast between the brokenness of our world and the world to come. It’s so different. There will be no violence. That’s said in so many places in Scripture—no violence, no terror.

Isaiah 62 says, “You will no longer be called deserted, and your land will not be called desolate. Instead, you will be called My delight is in her, and your land married, for the Lord delights in you, and your land will be married,” which is such an interesting concept. But it’s this beautiful marriage that God has created us to exist in. The Bride of Christ coming down from heaven, and the land is perfected and beautiful.

So that idea that it’s not just desolate anymore. It’s thick. It’s renewed. It’s perfected. And it’s prepared by Him for us—the One who has created things like stars. It just blows my mind, the things that God has created. Things like the vampire squid on the bottom of the ocean floor, deepest part of the sea. These beautiful things we see already are just scratching the surface of what the land is going to contain for us, the glories and the wonders and the beauties.

The more I saw in Scripture, the more it struck me, “Man, God talks a lot about land.” I tend to think of that as an Old Testament concept, but we see it throughout Scripture, and we begin and end with it.

So it starts in Genesis—God is creating land. He’s creating this concrete place where He’s going to set His people, the people that He has dreamed up and loved before the foundations of the land. And then at the very end, He is making the land new.

And it’s real. It’s not some abstract ethereal thing in the sky. It’s land. He’s bringing heaven down, new heavens and a new earth, and we’re made for it. From the beginning to the end, we’re made for land.

Most of my life has been in a concrete jungle, I call it. I stole that from somewhere. But it’s busy city spaces and apartments that are just crammed in or houses that are lined up closely. I haven’t gotten to experience a sweeping landscape or a farm or a ranch, but that is what I crave. I think it was put there.

We see that this is a significant thing that God promises His people their own land. And we’re longing for the land that left. That’s what that is. We’re longing for an earth that will never grow weeds. I’ve worked so hard on my backyard, and it literally just goes to pot so fast. I mean, it’s just crazy! Like, overnight, six-foot-tall weeds. There are bugs and different fungal invasions, but this land is going to be everything we’ve ever craved.

There’s this whole homesteading phase, people moving out to the country and working land because it’s what we desire. But the true (if you want to say homestead) will be an extraordinary, indescribable experience of this beautiful land that has a river of life running through it, and it has the tree of life. I mean, if you start to picture this, it’s on both sides of the river. And so somehow, you’re, like, “Is that this grown forest of trees?”

We don’t know what that means, but you start looking at these pictures of the land to come, and it is breathtaking. It’s going to fulfill every longing we’ve ever had for land, no matter how beautiful our land is here. If somebody owns the most beautiful land, property on this side of things, it doesn’t hold a candle to what’s to come.

So I think that longing has grown in me. The closer I get to eternity, the more I long for that land that God has prepared.

Yes, I think this longing for land has made me see, “What do I have to be faithful with now? The Lord says he who is faithful with little will be faithful with much, will be entrusted with much. We have, I think it’s mid-size. Some people would say it’s small. Like, if I look out at my backyard, I see a bunch of neighbors all at the same time. I can see them cooking in their kitchen. So it’s a little tight, but it’s got enough space where we’ve been able to just make a lot of strides in growing some things.

I’m not very good at gardening or growing things, that’s a little bit of a struggle for me, but I want to work at it. And something about watching plants grow and seeing the green and seeing it start as either this little seedling or starter plant, and then grow into this mass of leaves. There’s something almost holy about each day when I go out to water and just watching the progress over time of the land yielding fruit and bearing life.

And in a small broken way on this side of things, it’s like a foreshadow of what’s to come. So in Revelation 22, it’s talking about that river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the land, down the middle of the city’s main street. And then the tree of life is on each side of this river, and it bears twelve kinds of fruit. That’s just crazy to me!

As I work my land, if you want to say it that way, again, it’s this foreshadowing of the fruit to come. It’s going to be fruit like we’ve never tasted. It’s going to be this new experience of food that we can’t even fathom.

But it’s this practice here of eternal realities. That’s what I feel like when I’m out in my little backyard trying to get something to grow and realizing that this is practicing for heaven in one sense. It’s where this is what we’ll do in the presence of Jesus, enjoy the fruit of the land that’s perfected and satisfies us in a way that doesn’t make us worship food or worship the land. It will all be life and in balance, and it will make us gaze on His beauty and worship Him more because of what the land is like. So I get to practice that in little ways in my own backyard.

There have been times I’ve hated my body because it’s so broken and it just works against me . . . so faithfully against me. I think it’s been maybe close to twenty years of just getting bad news after bad news after bad news about different health conditions, chronic conditions, and then eventually cancer, and then eventually terminal cancer. And so there have been times I literally hate my body. That’s a weird thing to say, but it doesn’t work for me.

And God has been working on my heart in this to say this is the body that gets to display Jesus. Like, I’ve prematurely aged from so much chemo. So many things have changed and then are limited and broken by my health journey. But to say, “God, put in me a beauty that is not a worldly beauty, but a beauty that makes people stop and go, ‘There’s got to be something about her God because I can’t explain what’s going on, but there’s a beauty there that is not Hollywood beauty, but it’s a compelling beauty, and I want to know Jesus more because of that.’”

When I’ve prayed like that, that changes how I see my body, and now I can say, “This is a dynamic, inhabited body to serve Jesus,” whether that’s from a recliner or that’s using all my facial muscles to express joy and to radiate Jesus to someone or to cry with someone and enter into their suffering. This is a body that is used for service.

There’s this balance. Right? We tend to do extremes. Either hate our body or worship it. And I’ve done both over time. But I pray that God teaches me to see it as a sacred place to serve Him and to radiate Him.

One thing that has become so real to me with the terminal diagnosis is how this body is not it. This body is not it. And in a culture that says, “Pour in as much time, effort, and money as you can into your body. Try to stay looking young. Try to stay looking your best,” it can begin to feel like this is it. This is the body that I need to preserve at all cost.

Instead, if we could wrap our minds around what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, I think it would transform our thoughts on the body. I’m in process in this. I feel like God’s grown me in this, but I have a long way to go to really understand these truths.

But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, this is verse 20, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” I love this idea of firstfruits.

So, right now, I’ve got this tomato plant that’s got two tomatoes that are ready. Those are the firstfruits. So this idea that Christ was buried, and now He is the first one to burst out of the soil with a new body, a new life. It says in verse 23, “Christ, the firstfruits; afterward, at his coming, those who belong to Christ,” we’re going to burst out of the soil.

I’m a seed. So, I’m not going to spend millions of dollars on a seed that falls into the soil. We will laugh at the amount of time and effort and thought we’ve put into our bodies here. That doesn’t mean we neglect them or abuse them or forget they exist. That’s not the point at all. Again, it’s this foreshadowing of there’s a body to come that lasts and that will not be a distraction. It won’t be an idol. It’s going to burst out of the soil.

And then, Paul goes on in verse 35. He says: 

Some [want to] ask, "How are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have when they come?" [Then he says,] "You fool!" What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow—you are not sowing the body that will be, but only a seed, perhaps, of wheat or another grain. But God gives it a body as He wants, and to each of the seeds its own body. (vv. 35–38)

And then he talks about the splendor. This is his phrase, “the splendor of the heavenly bodies is different from that of the earthly ones” (v. 40). So he’s making this contrast. Like, “This is nothing compared to the body that we’re going to get.”

And this idea that it has to die. It has to go—buried into the ground. So my body is going to die at some point. God knows my last day. I will be put into the ground. My soul is immediately in His presence. I’m home with the Lord. Our bodies are going to be crazy amazing, but they have to die first, and this is just a seed.

One of the sweetest gifts of this journey are the people who have gone before me. I talk a lot about them. Those who have suffered by faith and with hope. One of those people is Amy Carmichael, a single missionary who went to India to rescue girls from temple prostitution. She actually took such a terrible fall that the last twenty years of her life were spent in bed in horrific pain.

One of the things she said was: 

Sorrow is one of the things that are lent, not given. A thing that is lent may be taken away. A thing that is given is not taken away. Joy is given. Sorrow is lent. It is lent to us for just a little while that we may use it for eternal purposes, then it will be taken away, and everlasting joy will be our Father’s gift to us. And the Lord God will wipe away all tears from off all faces. So let us use this lent thing to draw us nearer to the heart of Him who was once a Man of Sorrows.

And it makes me think of 2 Corinthians 4:17, where Paul is talking about persevering. He says: 

We don’t give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (vv. 16–18)

And I think of Paul, oh, man, he has encouraged me so much, because you think about . . . He was flogged—was it four or five times? And you think about, it was to the point of death. Right before death they would stop the lashing. And he would heal from that. When I’ve had scars from the different surgeries, it doesn’t heal and go back to the way it originally was. There is something different.

And you think about your flesh being torn until you’re to the brink of death, then healing up with scars. Then it happens again. Then he heals up not quite so great the next time, right? Probably. And then it happens again. And this is four or five times.

But you think about the pain he must have suffered just in his back, maybe his spine, nerves. Like, this man, when he says, “Our outer person is being destroyed,” he was living this. He wasn’t just throwing something out. He’s bearing in his body a suffering for the gospel.

And he also had the emotional suffering and all the other things he mentioned. But there was physical suffering: the shipwreck, sleepless nights, not having enough food, and his body was beat up. So he’s saying, “This is momentary and light.” Flogged almost to the point of death multiple times, don’t have enough food sometimes, don’t sleep sometimes, shipwrecked multiple times—it’s momentary.

And that’s what Amy Carmichael is saying. She says, “This is lent. This is not given. This is momentary, and it will be over, and joy will be ours forever.”

I’m always, always constantly aware that tomorrow is fragile, and I could breathe my last. Treatment weakens my heart, so it could be a heart attack. There’s so many ways that I could just go quickly. When my cancer is in grow mode, it’s fast. And so I thank the Lord for the palpable reminder that this is really fast and eternity is forever, and it’s everything. I’m grateful for that.

It’s painful, and it’s terrible. The worst part is for Eddie and Jeremy. I can’t even measure how much that wrecks me. But for them, too, it’s short. Right? That’s what comforts me. Very soon all of us in this room will be immediately there. In a heartbeat. It’s so close.

Nancy: When you keep an eternal perspective, it affects the way you live your day-to-day life. Colleen Chao has been reminding us of that. She senses that heaven is near, and she’s been giving us insight into how we can live in light of eternity.

Colleen writes about the brevity of life and the hope of heaven in her brand-new book, On Our Way Home: Reflections on Heaven in the Face of Death.

No matter how young or old you are, whether you’re suffering sickness or you're quite well physically today, I hope you’ll get a copy and be reminded that those who put their faith in Jesus are always moving closer and closer to their ultimate goal of being with Him.

Colleen’s book includes thirty-one short, easy-to-read chapters. But each one is packed with biblical insight and truths that she’s learned in the fires of suffering.

We’d love to send you Colleen’s book, On Our Way Home, as our way of saying, “Thank you for your help in making this program possible,” with a gift of any size. You can visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com to make your donation and request Colleen’s book, On Our Way Home. You’ll also be able to order a copy of her book, In the Hands of a Fiercely Tender God. It’s a powerful reflection on suffering.

Again, our website is ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Dannah: One way to cultivate a passion for eternity is to spend time alone with God in His Word and through prayer. Tomorrow Nancy will help you develop a lifelong habit to experience intimacy with the Lord. Please join us again for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.