Death and the Resurrection

My paternal grandmother passed away this past Thursday. I was named after her, but I have never been very close to any of my grandparents for a variety of reasons. These reasons don't matter anymore, but our relationship can best be described by the fact that we simply have never understood each other. The years that separate us are significant years - wars, women's lib, a sexual revolution, the internet - major cultural changes have occurred, giving me opportunities and choices that my grandmothers never imagined. So at an age when they were getting married and starting their families, I was moving hundreds of miles away from my family to get an education.
In light of the divides between us, I've come to look at the resurrection and the world to come in a new way.
Often when we as Christians lose our loved ones, we comfort ourselves with the thought of being reunited with our loved ones, telling ourselves that they are not really gone, just temporarily separated from us. We rightly look forward to the day when we are together again.
But the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come promises us much more than simply a resumption of our current relationships.
When the Kingdom of God has fully come, when we live in the new heaven and the new earth and we are reunited with those we've loved and lost, we will not simply be the same frail and fallen people we are now.
In that day, we will be complete in our sanctification, we will be the people that God intended us to be all along. We will stop speaking past each other, and begin to truly understand the other. We will cease our impatience with each other and know what it is like to love and be loved in the light of Christ.
I look forward to that day, because I look forward to the day when my grandmothers and I can see each other, not across the distance of generations and decades, not from two different worlds, but within the Light of Christ in a world with no need of a sun.
That's what we have as Christians - not merely the promise of a relationship renewed, but of a relationship restored and redeemed. We look forward to the day when we are no longer separated by our differences, but united in our worship.