EXCLUSIVE: WHAT IS HEAVEN LIKE?

What is heaven like? The Bible gives us some insights in various passages, especially in the book of Revelation, but even that, is looking through a glass darkly. The world we live in now is an abberation, completly designed for decay and death. Everything and everyone around us is in some state of deterioration. If you truly understood what Heaven is like, and what it would be like to be there, you would change all your negative lifestyle habits and attitudes. Think of the happiest moment you've ever experienced, think of the best you've ever felt, think of the most incredible beautiful sight you've ever seen, magnify it billions of times, and understand there is no end to this joy, no aging, no pain, no disease, no lonliness, no fear, no doubt, no discomfort, no death, and you only scratch the surface of what it's like in the Paradise of God. Majesty beyond conception, brightness and light of such beauty, it's beyond description.
Let's imagine we're standing on a vast plain, with the heavenly city towering above us in resplendent beauty. Our eyes behold a brilliant, shining city, with light streaming through its jasper walls and pearly gates, and a full spectrum of color gleaming from its jeweled foundation. As we gaze in awe on the city, the first thing to attract our attention is its massive jasper wall. The apostle John described it as follows: "The light was like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. We know that these semi-precious stones are translucent in composition, so that light is able to pass through them. From these jasper walls, therefore, radiate brilliant rays of dazzling color for all to see. The glory of the city will thus be visible from afar, and even the dwellers in the area outside the walls will share in its brightness.

Although the wall around the city is real, it is also symbolic. The purpose of the wall is not to preserve the city against invaders, for God will have no enemies in the new earth. Being 216 feet high, it impressively signifies that no one will enter the city apart from God's grace. The wall is too high to be scaled by human effort, and the only portals are the 12 guarded gates. The requirement for admittance is salvation, and no one who has rejected God's plan will be able to go in. Salvation is the gift of God's grace to those who humbly acknowledge their need of forgiveness and who receive Jesus Christ as Savior.

The next thing to catch our vision as we look at the city is its jeweled foundation. Many Bible students believe that these jewels reflect all the colors of the rainbow, though we do not know the precise characteristics of each stone. Beginning at ground level, these were probably the colors seen by the apostle: the jasper stone may have been a light green or yellow; the sapphire, a sky-blue or azure; the chalcedony, containing a combination of colors, was mostly green and blue; the emerald, bright green; the sardonyx, red and white; the sardius, reddish in color; chrysolite, golden yellow; beryl, sea-green; topaz, yellow-green and transparent; chrysoprasus, golden-green; jacinth, violet; and amethyst, either rose-red or purple. The radiating light of the city, shining out through the jasper wall and blazing through the open gates, reflects from these precious stones in splendrous color.



And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass (Rev. 21:12,21). Some Bible scholars believe that these gates of pearl suggest salvation by grace. Even as a wound to an oyster results in the formation of a valuable pearl, the gates of heaven can be entered only because the Lord Jesus was "wounded for our transgressions" (Is. 53:5). Although men wickedly rejected Him and crucified Him, it was through this death that salvation was made possible. Now, all who believe on Him can look forward to entering the pearly gates of heaven. Jesus Himself said, "I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved" (John 10:9).

The gates are open at all times and in every direction, for salvation is still offered freely to everyone. The angels who keep watch at the open gates, therefore, are a wonderful contrast to the cherubim who guarded the closed gate of Eden after Adam and Eve sinned. These angels keep the way of access open, while the cherubim kept the Garden closed to fallen humanity. One of the characteristics of the heavenly city is the abundance of gold. A precious commodity throughout man's history, gold has been used as an overlay in works of art and as a standard of value, and has been the means of a great amount of both good and evil in society.

It served the purposes of God in the tabernacle and temple, for much gold was in evidence there; it was also used by idolaters in the making of images. On earth, men have fought, suffered, and died for it. But in the New Jerusalem, gold will be so plentiful that it will be used for cobblestones and building blocks. And it will be like glass, possessing transparent qualities, so that the glorious light of the holy city will both shine through it and be reflected by it. Here is John's description: The city was pure gold, like clear glass. . . . and the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass (Rev. 21:18,21). Traditionally, gold has symbolized purity. In the wedding band, for example, the circle speaks of endlessness and the gold stands for purity. The golden street of the New Jerusalem, therefore, might well suggest the pure and holy walk of God's redeemed in eternal paradise. And the brightness of the city, reflecting from the gold that abounds everywhere, will have its uncorrupted counterpart within the heart of every citizen of Heaven. Purity pervades the eternal Paradise of God.



A river clear as crystal will flow through the New Jerusalem. The apostle John declared: And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Rev. 22:1). Just as in Eden there was a river to water the garden, so also in the New Jerusalem there will be a river of life. It will begin at the throne of God, the very uppermost part of the city, and it will course downward through the entire area. In the New Jerusalem, a river of crystal will flow forever, reminding us for all eternity that God has graciously and abundantly provided for our every spiritual need. Remember, life in eternity will not be a nebulous existence in some nameless place. No indeed! We will lead rich and full lives in glorified bodies. We'll dwell on a renewed earth in a real city of gold, and our lives will be filled with significance and meaning as we give praise to our Redeemer and gladly do His bidding.

This crystal river flowing through our eternal home will be of sparkling beauty and of clarity beyond the purest water man has ever seen. Think of it! All who believe in Christ will walk the banks of this glorious crystal river. What a joy will then be ours! It's difficult to envision just how the trees, the crystal river, and the street of gold will be related. Some Bible teachers feel that a river will flow through the middle of a broad street, and that alongside the river on each bank will be the trees. Others believe that a grove of trees is centered between the avenue of gold on one side and the river on the other. Regardless of which view you may choose, it's evident that those who conceive of Heaven as a place where the redeemed will do nothing but sit on golden stairs playing harps are grossly mistaken. Life in heaven will be filled with beauty and variety.

We've been concerned with what the Bible tells us about our eternal home. We have seen its beauty from without: its gleaming jasper walls, its jeweled foundations, and its gates of pearl. We have also seen its glory within as we have envisioned the street of gold, the crystal river, and the tree of life. This glimpse of our eternal home should bring two responses to the heart of the true believer in Christ. First, there should be a renewed determination to place top priority on the spiritual and eternal rather than on the physical and temporal. Therefore, in anticipation of the glory and beauty of our eternal home, begin right now to "lay up . . . treasures in heaven" (Matt. 6:20) by putting God first, and by a constant willingness to serve Him. The thought of Heaven should cheer us when we become discontented with life and discouraged about the future. No matter how bad things may be going or how difficult the struggles, the prospect of that wonderful abode awaiting us should be a source of encouragement and hope.

We will know a purity, bliss, and love such as could never be experienced here. Writing in Revelation 21 and 22, the apostle John recorded his vision of an immense city of shimmering beauty, descending slowly from heaven to become the capital city of our eternal home. It will be radiant with the light of God's glory shining through its jasper walls, its jeweled foundation, and its pearly gates. And this city, the New Jerusalem, will be the eternal abode of all who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ. All who have been saved will walk the street of gold in transformed, eternal, glorified bodies. We'll enjoy heaven's beautiful crystal river and have ready access to its tree of life. We'll be eternally delivered from every evil and burden that plagues our world today. And we'll finally have become what God intended us to be.




In that perfect society we'll realize our full spiritual potential as individuals. Having entered an eternal fellowship with God, we'll be engaged in an endless variety of meaningful activities. We'll join with the saints of all the ages in a spirit of communion, fellowship, and love never ending. We'll see that the imperfections of this life will be missing and that positive blessings will be there in abundance. All you have to do is stop clinging through sentimentality and emotion, to the miserable, hopeless, death centered way of life the world has decieved you into living, and cut your emotional bondage to it, become a new person inside and out, and find a destiny of never ending hope.

The Office, Housebroken

IT was not so long ago, Neal Zimmerman recalls, that the term home office meant something very different from what it does today. In the early ’90s, when Mr. Zimmerman, a prominent workplace architect with offices in West Hartford, Conn., started designing residential work spaces, most people thought “home office” meant the headquarters of a company. Back then, the very idea of working at home had a certain stigma, except in a few vocations like freelance writing. In the popular imagination, he said, “people who worked from home were usually laid off or couldn’t hold down a job, or were peripheral to the work force.”

But by 2006, according to data collected by the Dieringer Research Group, a marketing research company in Brookfield, Wis., more than 28 million Americans were working from home at least part time — an increase of 10 percent from just the year before, and 40 percent from 2002. The American Home Furnishings Alliance reports that 7 in 10 Americans now have offices or designated workstations in their homes, a 112 percent increase since 2000. And a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders found that home offices ranked as the fourth most important feature in a new upscale home, just ahead of security.

In addition to new technologies that have enabled the telecommuting revolution, Marilyn Zelinsky-Syarto, a writer specializing in workplace design, pointed to an increase in design options as part of the reason for the change. “Years ago,” said Ms. Zelinsky-Syarto, who has her own home office in Fairfield, Conn., “it was Staples or a high-end furniture store with ridiculously large or tiny writing desks that did not fit technology. Nothing in between.”

“But now,” she added, “we have carpenters creating custom built-ins in home office spaces and filling them with furniture from a variety of sources. Plus, there are a whole heck of a lot more affordable interior designers willing to take on one room at a time.”

There are also several distinct needs and desires being expressed by their clients. As more Americans come to see home offices as central to their lives, those offices say more about them as individuals, and each of the four examples discussed here certainly reflects its owner. But each also speaks to what decorators, architects and furniture manufacturers describe as a major aspect of the growing market for home offices, and of the ways millions of Americans are living and working at home.

A Room of His Very, Very Own
The American fascination with luxury in recent years has given rise to what Ms. Zelinsky-Syarto called the “status symbol office,” one “that shows everyone how hard you worked to pay for that million-dollar-plus house.” Among men in particular, the demand has increased for touches of grandeur from the turn of the last century, like intricate wood paneling and antique partners’ desks. Few men, though, could hope to compete with the walnut-paneled office that Alexander L. Cappello, the founder, chairman and chief executive of the Cappello Capital Corporation, a merchant bank, has filled with guns, swords, animal heads and other accouterments of masculinity.

“My friend’s wife calls it the testosterone room,” said Mr. Cappello, who decorated the two-story 40-by-60-foot room in his Brentwood, Calif., house himself. “It’s got all the things I’m passionate about.”

The office, which Mr. Cappello said cost $300,000 to $350,000, holds three dozen antique chess sets, several hundred globes, 1,800 handmade canes from around the world and thousands of antique books. The paneling came from a castle in the south of France, and the Empire-period fireplace, he said, was built for one of Napoleon’s residences. A billiard table from 1849 and a large partners’ desk anchor opposite ends of the room, and 19th-century military and animal paintings adorn the walls, along with two big plasma screens, “for watching football games with my buddies,” he said.

The desire for such masculine space isn’t limited to multimillionaires, said Eric Heim, a senior designer and the store manager at Manhattan Cabinetry. “It’s every man’s dream,” he said. “They can hang out there, and no one bothers them

Several manufacturers have introduced office furniture that responds to this seemingly universal desire. Clarendon, a line of 17th-century English-style wall units from Hooker Furniture, wraps around a room, creating a built-in look with elaborate moldings and traditional hardware. The set retails for $20,000, with options including a matching desk and chair, a computer hutch, a bookcase, a credenza, an entertainment center large enough for a 60-inch flat-screen television, and a bar cabinet.

More affordable options include Maitland-Smith’s enormous Black Angus and cowhide partners’ desk (about $9,000), which is so big that two people can use it facing each other, with their own kneeholes, and Pottery Barn’s new Montego roll-top desk ($1,999).

In a working environment, though, grandeur has one drawback, at least on the scale of Mr. Cappello’s office. It’s “a little bit cluttered,” he said. “It basically looks like an antique store inside. Whenever I have meetings at home, they’re always in the wine cellar.”

Women Have Stuff, Too

“For many years the only space a woman had to work in was shared with the rest of the family, at the end of the kitchen counter or in a guest bedroom,” said Christopher Lowell, an interior designer with a nationally syndicated radio show and a television show that he said is to start this year on the Fine Living network. “She never had a place where she could put her stuff out and leave her stuff out.”

It is a mentality that persists even when women have space to spare, said Alexa Hampton, a New York designer. “They have huge houses but somehow feel guilty owning the fact that they run the house and their kids’ lives, and have jobs and do 50 other things that normal human beings shouldn’t be able to do.”

Only recently have designers begun recognizing that women need work spaces on a par with their husbands’ and taken steps to create them, Ms. Hampton said. Even so, she added, “we almost need to force women to do it.”

That was the case for Christine Jowers, the founder of Christine Jowers/Moving Arts Projects, a dance production company in Manhattan, who was accustomed to holding meetings in her bedroom or kitchen. “The dance field is really laid back, and people are always friendly and casual,” she said. “But still, it was just weird.”

So when Ms. Jowers and her husband, Robert Friedman, moved to an apartment near the Bowery in June, she hired Bill Suk, an architect at the Truisi Suk Design Group in Manhattan, to add a room on the rooftop that she could devote entirely to work, away from the high-traffic areas used by her sons, age 5 and 9.

The other key to making the space suitable for work — and not just an extra room that would become a catchall for domestic overflow — was adequate storage: she has a custom filing cabinet, where she can keep her writings, and bookshelves for her large library of dance books. She added a desk bought at an antiques store 10 years ago and plastic drawers from National Wholesale Liquidators. The total cost of the project, including building permits, was just over $30,000, she said.

Some retailers are now responding to women’s need for dedicated home office space by offering products specifically geared toward their requirements. Office Depot, recognizing that more than half its customers are women and that businesses owned by women were growing twice as fast in number as others, has added several new lines of furniture, including the Christopher Lowell Collection, which has sold so well that the company is now developing furniture sized and scaled for women under its own brand name, said Richard Diamond, an Office Depot vice president.

I’m a gadget freak, but I don’t like to be surrounded by stuff,” Mr. Unkrich said. “When I’m working, I need to have a very clear mind. I can’t have chaos around me.”

To create a streamlined work space, Mr. Unkrich hired Mark Dutka, an interior designer who runs the InHouse Design Studio in San Francisco. Mr. Dutka came up with what he called a partial-perimeter solution: two-thirds of the room is dedicated to Mr. Unkrich’s work space, so he can reach almost everything he needs without getting up; the rest functions as a den.

The desk and cabinets are made of makoré, an exotic wood that Mr. Unkrich liked for its warmth and its interesting grain. They hide pullout shelves that hold an array of audio and visual components, and a wire management trough under the desk. Aware that Mr. Unkrich would probably update his gear frequently, Mr. Dutka said he made sure the storage wasn’t so component-specific that it couldn’t accommodate whatever sizes or shapes came next.

To give the space visual interest, an opposing wall and a desk extension were covered with eucalyptus, which is much lighter than makoré and has pronounced striations. The final touches included a couch where Ms. Unkrich’s wife, Laura Century, could sit and read, and shelves on the wall next to the desk with two rolling stools their three children, age 3, 8 and 10, can pull over when Mr. Unkrich is in need of a consultation.

For Mr. Unkrich, the best part of the room — which he said cost under six figures — is not what you see, but what you don’t. “You walk into the room, and you don’t see anything except the computer monitors.”

Small Spaces, Big Dreams

In New York, the increased demand for home offices has been accompanied by a pronounced rise in the cost of real estate, so city dwellers have become adept at carving places to work out of ever-smaller spaces.

When Alessandra Gouldner and her husband (who works in law enforcement and asked not to be named) moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 2003, Ms. Gouldner turned the second bedroom into a home office for her interior design business, AG Interiors. There were a few overflow work items, like fabric samples and a photocopier, but Ms. Gouldner stashed them on the 2 ½-by-4-foot storage platform that the previous owners had installed in the hallway just under the ceiling, along with a narrow staircase leading to it.

But after her daughter, Lulu, was born in 2005, Ms. Gouldner decided to turn her office into a nursery. And since every other part of the apartment’s 1,100 square feet was already in use, she was left with nothing but the tiny platform at the top of the stairs.

Convinced she could make the space work as an office, Ms. Gouldner found a 48-inch-wide desk — a parson’s table in white from West Elm — that ran the width of the alcove, maximizing work space. (Her biggest challenge, she said, was persuading her husband to carry it up the stairs, since there was no wiggle room. “There was a lot of sweat and cursing that day,“ she said.)

After ruthlessly paring down her work equipment and materials, she stored what remained, including her phone and fax, on two tiers of wood shelving she installed — also in white, to minimize any sense of clutter. She hired an electrician to run all the wires behind the cabinets and add under-shelf lighting for the desktop, and bought a backless wooden stool that could be tucked under the desk. The total cost was about $2,000.

“I’m actually really proud that I turned this tiny little afterthought of a space into a fully functioning office,” Ms. Gouldner said. “That the space is limited doesn’t limit me.” It serves all her needs, she noted, and is tall enough to stand up in. “I’m 5-foot-8, and it’s probably 5-foot-10.”

Even so, there isn’t much room to move around. “If I lean back,” she said, “I fall down the stairs.”



High-Tech, and Hidden
The explosion of digital technologies has led to a new set of challenges for designers trying to create comfortable, uncluttered work spaces, particularly for clients whose jobs — or predilections — involve the use of multiple devices. Lee Unkrich, who works at Pixar Animation Studios and is currently directing “Toy Story 3,” uses a Mac Pro computer with two monitors at his home office in Marin County, Calif., along with sundry digital media players, cameras and scanners, an Epson photo printer and a control panel that lets him use his Crestron home automation system to adjust the heat, air-conditioning, lighting and security system from anywhere inside or outside the house.

The New Year’s Cocktail

The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters

The ideal New Year’s Eve party would come with a psychological voucher, redeemable the next day for a post-mortem session with friends. A chance to relish the night’s humiliations, take bets on who went home with whom, and nominate the guest most in need of therapy, present company included.


Geraldine Georges
An opportunity, that is, to forestall the traditional morning-after descent into self-examination, that lonely echo chamber of what should and could be.

Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.

Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

Yet it is partly from studies of lost possible selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality. These studies, in people recently divorced and those caring for a sick child, among others, suggest that it is possible to entertain idealized versions of oneself without being mocked or shamed. And they suggest that doing so may serve an important psychological purpose.

Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones.

A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”

With age, people apparently detoxified their regrets by reframing them as shared misunderstandings, a retrospective touching-up that in many cases might have been more accurate.

In a series of studies, Laura A. King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, has had people write down a description of their future as they imagined it before a life-altering event, like divorce. She has found that those who are able to talk or write about this lost future without sinking into despair or losing hope tend to have developed another quality, called complexity.

Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.

Here is how a woman from Dallas described the impact of an early and devastating divorce, in one of Dr. King’s studies:

“I feel fortunate in a backhanded way to have experienced misfortune as a young woman. I feel it taught me humility ... and the ability to regroup. ... Life is good but not lavish. It’s hard work and we have to give each other a hand once in a while.”

Another woman in the same study, who had scored lower on a measure of complexity, described her life after divorce: “What good is anything without someone to share it with? My current goal is only to make enough money to make my monthly bills without withdrawing money from my savings account.”

Dr. King has followed groups of people for years and found that this knack for self-evaluation develops over time; it is a learned ability. “To elaborate on loss, to look for some insight in it, is not just what a psychologically mature person does,” Dr. King said. “It’s how a person matures. That’s what the studies show.”

Good therapists have long known the value of seeing regretted choices in the context of what has been gained as well as lost. A full-blown career in dance leaves little time for a family, or much else. The reverse is also true, of course. Starting a family with that perfect someone at age 22 makes it hard to tour South America with a guitar on your back. And was he really so perfect?

“The idea is move people away from this element of resentment, the sense that if only my parents this or I had done that, I would have what I want,” said Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “That’s a dead end.”

Even the perspective from which people remember slights or mistakes can affect the memories’ emotional impact, new research suggests. A recent Columbia study found that reimagining painful scenes from a third-person point of view, as if seeing oneself in a movie, blunted their emotional sting and facilitated precisely the sort of clearheaded self-perception that Dr. King described.

Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own.

Granted, it may be hard to make the case that one of those is the person capsized on the couch, recovering from last year’s last party. But give it a few days. Ghost-busting is possible, but best done without a hangover.