Sometimes I Think About Who I'll See in Heaven

I used to be able to use my other blogs for messages that don't really belong here but Blogger/Google messed that up for me because I'm too low-tech to know how to navigate whatever they did to my blogs. Anyway here's another oddball topic I would have put somewhere else but have to put here:

I discovered two actors recently I expect to see in heaven, which considering the way things are going on this miserable planet could be very soon, and I just feel like noting the discovering. One of them is highly unexpected.

These are Cicely Tyson and Steve McQueen.

Start with McQueen since he's the unexpected one. I was never a fan of his, a macho actor typ-e I didn't pay much attention to, and I never heard anything about his having any Christian beliefs before he died. But then recently I happened to flip my radio dial to the FM Fox Channel when the local AM conservative KOH was doing something boring, where it happened they were doing "our Americaqn Story" about McQueen. I like that program when I get to hear it. It was almost at the end of his story and the narrator talked about how McQueen had visited a church and respobnded to a call to give his life to Christ, then some time later grilled the pastor about questioned he had. The pastor wanted to know if he was born again and McQueen assured him that he was, and it sounds like he was just from the fact that he was dedicated to making things right with people. He died of cancer not long afterward at the young age of 50.

Steve McQueen in heaven? How unlikely? But I think I'll see him there.

The idea that Cicely tyson would be in heaven is not such a big surprise but of course you never know about someone until you know. I was impressed by her tears and singing along with the performance of "Blessed Assurance" at the Kennedy Center's honoring of her life at the age of ninety. Since she'd sung that hymn herself in the Broadway production of "The Trip to Bountiful: just a few years earlier, her response could have been mostly sentimentality, but it didn't feel that way. It felt like genuine Christian faith, and happiness to hear such a true gospel song at such an event.

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,
Oh what a foretaste of glory divine.
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His spirit, washed in His blood.


That's a hyman that packs the whole gospel message into very few words. (by the way you can see her in the movie version of "A Trip to Bountiful" on Amazon, maybe other places but I saw it at Amazon.

Then as I did my usual thing of tracking down interviews with her since I didn't know much about her, eventually I ran across her speech at the memorial service for Maya Angelou which she opened with the line from another solid gospel hymn: "My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blodd and righteousness." So here's the first verse of that one:

My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame
Bur wholly lean on Jesus' name.

On Christ the solid Rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand.
All other ground is sinking sand.


She was a member of the Abysinnian Church of Harlem until her death this last January at the age of 96. I have the strong impression that she inhabits the gospel message of both those hymns. I'll be happy to see her in Jesus' prsence.