It won't be any consolation to those who expected to go rocketing off into the bosom of Jesus yesterday for front-row seats to watch the rest of us die in fear and agony, but the way my evangelical relatives described heaven to me always struck me as unbelievably boring. Clearly one would require a complete frontal lobotomy to be "happy" there forever.
Here's what heaven is supposed to be like: singing and praising God forever (with or without wings, harp or harp-free... oh, those little denominational variations!). That's pretty much it. "Eternal rest." Yep. But lots of singing and praising when one isn't resting.
OK, I can see how that sort of thing might be fun and appropriate, at least for the first little while (I'm assuming one could go quite a way just on relief from having been spared the Fires of Hell and all)... but holy crap, for eternity? That's it?
I mean, after they've watched the Wicked get purged from the Earth in as many gruesome ways as can be imagined, and after the Last Judgment when the Wicked are sent to burn in everlasting agony in Hell (not having learned their lessons from previous mortal torments, and with an infinite and loving God's mercy apparently having a finite time limit)... what then? Do the Saved get to watch endless reruns so they can keep on feeling good about how special they are? ("Oh goody! my favorite episode of The Torments of the Damned! I never get tired of watching it!")
Sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. Praise, praise, praise, praise, praise. Tune harp. (No, scratch that, celestial harps never need tuning.) Sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. Praise, praise, praise, praise, praise. From everlasting to everlasting, worlds without end. (Amen.)
BOR-ing!
Now, see, I was raised mormon, so I grew up thinking that my eternal reward would be learning to be a god someday — making worlds without number, peopling the worlds that I do right (not too close or far away from a single-star system, preferably), zipping about one or more universes, maybe even occasionally stopping by some of the Lower Kingdoms of Heaven (still heaven! just not as great as the highest heaven!) to say hi to some of my old non-mormon friends.
(You really have to work to go to mormon hell —a.k.a. "Outer Darkness" — and only bad, bad, bad former mormons can even begin to think about qualifying to pal around with Satan.)
Anyway, even though the mormon idea of heaven involves lots of hard work (so much for the notion of "eternal rest"!), and is fraught with its own problems [warning: pdf] (women's role in the eternities, specter of eternal polygamy, celestial spirit childbirth forever, patriarchal rule, and so on), it's a damned sight more interesting than the angel food fluff-version that the Rapture-worthy seem to believe in. (Mormons by evangelical definition cannot be Rapture-worthy, 'cause mormon Jesus is much more interesting than theirs, and the evangelicals are jealous. Just sayin'.)
Free lobotomies with every "caught up" or resurrected body! Yep, that's what it would take to do nothing but sing and praise God time out of one's ever-lovin', everlastin' mind.
YMMV.