Rest Until The Rising

There are questions we ask politely… and questions we ask only in the dark. Some questions are safe enough to ask across a dinner table or in a church lobby, but others rise up from the deeper places of the soul. They don’t need microphones. They don’t need applause. They live in the quiet corners of our hearts, where honesty has no camouflage and faith has no makeup. And one of those questions—the question almost everyone is dying to know—is simply, What really happens when I die?

I remember sitting in a small hospital room with a family who had asked me to come quickly. Their father was slipping in and out of consciousness, the machines humming like a mechanical choir in the background. The hallway smelled of antiseptic and late-night coffee.

One of his daughters—thirty years old, exhausted, mascara streaked from too many hours holding in too many tears—looked at me and whispered the question she’d been holding back all day. “Pastor… where is he going? Where is he right now? When he closes his eyes… what happens next?”

She wasn’t looking for poetry. She wasn’t looking for doctrine in bullet points. She was looking for hope to hold onto while everything else was slipping out of her hands.

Moments like that confront every one of us eventually. Whether it’s in a hospital room, or standing in a cemetery with our breath fogging in the cold morning air, or lying awake at two o’clock in the morning staring at the ceiling while the weight of our own mortality presses on our chest—those moments draw that question right out of us. What happens when the heart stops? Where do we go? What do we become? What does God do with us then?

Most Christians think they already know. We’ve heard the language since childhood. “They’re in a better place.” “They’re walking the streets of gold.” “They’re smiling down on us.” I’ve said those phrases at funerals myself when I didn’t yet understand what Scripture actually says. And for the longest time, I believed them because they sounded comforting, and they felt familiar, and everyone else seemed to believe them too.

But familiarity isn’t the same as truth. And comfort isn’t the same as hope. There is a kind of comfort that’s like a warm blanket—soft for the moment but too thin to withstand a storm. Then there is comfort that’s like a rock—unmoving, trustworthy, strong enough to stand on when the waves hit. When people ask me about death, they aren’t looking for the blanket. They’re looking for the rock.

In that hospital room, I prayed for the father as he drifted. I prayed for peace, for mercy, for the nearness of Jesus. But inside my mind a quiet wrestling began. I knew the common belief: that the moment a believer dies, their soul floats upward into the presence of God. I’d grown up with that. I’d preached it once myself. “Absent from the body, present with the Lord.” We say it quickly, as if the text actually says that sequence, that timing, those details. But does it?

I remember sitting with the daughter after her father took his final breath. She held his hand long after the nurses quietly unplugged the machines. She didn’t speak—not for several minutes. Then she asked again, softer this time, “Pastor… where is he now?”

And I found myself saying something that surprised even me—not a doctrinal lecture, not a theological argument, but something from the Scripture’s own language: “Right now, he’s resting. Safe in Christ. Held in God’s memory, guarded by His promise. And when Jesus comes… He will wake him up.”

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t resist. She didn’t argue. A simple peace settled on her face, as if the idea of rest—not floating, not wandering, not leaving this world to go somewhere else—was somehow gentler, more comforting, more… biblical.

I saw it again a few years later when I preached at the funeral of a young mother. I stood at the front of the church, looking at a sanctuary full of people who were all asking the same question in their hearts: Where is she? When the final hymn ended and the service was over, a man with graying hair pulled me aside. “You talked about sleep,” he said, “but I always thought she was in heaven already. I want to believe that. But I also want to believe the Bible.”

He paused. “Are those the same thing?”

That question has stayed with me. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s honest. Honest questions deserve honest answers. And sometimes the honest answer from Scripture is different from the folklore that’s become comfortable in our churches.

We want to picture the people we love already walking on clouds, singing in choirs, exploring heaven like tourists in a brand-new city. And I understand that longing. But as I’ve walked through Scripture, I’ve discovered something far more beautiful than the imagery we’ve borrowed from greeting cards and movies. Something more hopeful than sentimental visions. Something more solid than philosophical speculation.