When my dad died a while ago, I wrote a children’s book called Where’s Grandpa? It is an adaptation of this simple parable of waterbugs and dragonflies by Doris Stickney.

Way down beneath the surface of a scummy pond lived a colony of waterbugs. It was, for them a wonderful world — plenty to do, lots to eat and family close beside them — so the waterbugs were, for the most part, very content.

Every once in a while, one of their friends or relatives would take a long climb up one of the reeds in the pond and end up above the water. And then he was gone.

On one of those days, a waterbug, who could very well have been the eldest, said to his companion, “Look, there goes another one. Where do you suppose he’s going?”

They waited for his return so they could find out, but he never came back.

“Another one gone. I wonder where he went. Wasn’t he happy here?”

No one seemed to know the answers to his many questions.

“I tell you what,” the leader bug said to his friend, “I’ve had enough of losing our family members and not knowing where they’ve gone. Why don’t we make a pact? The next one of us who climbs a reed and goes above the water must promise to return and tell us what is on the other side.”

His friend agreed.

Well it wasn’t very long before the very bug who’d made the suggestion began his own climb up to the surface. Up, up, up he climbed. When the little waterbug reached the top, he found himself laying in the sunshine on a large green lily pad. But something felt different.

When he looked at his reflection in the water, he could hardly believe what he saw. His body had been marvellously changed. No longer was he a grey waterbug — he was now a beautiful, shiny blue dragonfly.

As the warm sunshine dried his new wings, he began to instinctively move them, and before he could stop himself, he was in the air. The dragonfly (who used to be a waterbug) was overwhelmed by joy. He rose and flipped, and dove through the air just like he’d always had wings. What an exhilarating freedom he felt.

But suddenly, he remembered his promise to his friend. Without further thought, he dove into the water so that he could announce the good news of his transformation. But when he hit the water, he was stopped. The dragonfly could not go back. He could not keep the pact he’d made.

“I cannot go back,” he exclaimed. “At least I tried. One day, when they climb the reed for themselves and become dragonflies, they will understand.”

And with that, the beautiful dragonfly once again lifted his wings and happily flitted off in his new world of air and sunshine.

The parable of those waterbugs that became dragonflies describes heaven as well as I could in any other way.

All I know for sure is that once we get there, we won’t want to come back.

It’s kind of like a child who has been born. He has moved from the warmth and security of his home inside his mother’s womb to our big, cold, noisy, colourful world. But can you imagine any person, after birth, saying, “I want to go back to my old home inside Mommy!” Of course not.

Heaven will be unimaginably more wonderful than our world and, once there, it would be just as unlikely that we will even think about coming back home.

Barry Buzza (www.barrybuzza.com and http://barrybuzza.blogspot.com) is senior pastor at Northside church in Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam.