I arrived in Heaven just yesterday. I think it goes without saying that I was amazed, dumbfounded by everything I saw and heard on that first day. The flowers, the angels, my ancestors, everything was quite surreal.
The strangest moment was when I met a man from Germany named Adolph. I was a student of the holocaust and I was captivated by stories he told, things I had never learned while I was alive, as if a whole new history book had been written and I wanted to read it from cover to cover.
Then the moment came when I learned the identity of the man with whom I had been speaking for several hours. Here was a man who knew details that had never been written. He told me things about Hilter, Himmler, and Goering that only someone who knew them well could know. That’s when it clicked. My new friend Adolph’s last name was Hitler. Yep, THAT Hitler.
I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I had just visited with some Jews earlier in the day who had died at Auschwitz. They told me about all the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust and how they were all in Heaven now. Jesus had forgiven those who never had a chance to meet Him, those who He knew would follow Him if they knew He was the Messiah. They were pious Jews who loved God, and God never stopped loving them.
God never stopped loving the other people He had created, either. Adolph told me about how he managed to make it to Heaven when anyone who had ever heard of him assumed he’d be doing hard time under the vengeful hand of Lucifer. He said that after he shot himself, before he lost conciousness, he saw an image of his mother crying and he suddenly realized how wrong he had been about so many things. He begged for God’s forgiveness as he died.
At this point, I was filled with rage. How could a just God allow one of history’s most evil men to enter into His kingdom? That’s when the archangel Gabriel appeared before me. He reminded me that God is a loving God, a forgiving God. He told me that our time on Earth is miniscule compared with everything that comes after. Our time on Earth is a test. Some people, like the saints, get an express ticket to Heaven while others, like Adolph, made it in by the skin of their teeth. The late Mother Angelica of EWTN fame compare God’s mercy to a drop of water in the ocean. Just as it’s impossible to count the drops of water in the ocean, it’s impossible to quantify the love, compassion, and mercy of God.