Being good in order to get to heaven

I just finished opining somewhere on the subject of whether you can get into heaven by being good. I have to admit that I said only half of what I have come to believe about this.

What I said was that if you enter into an intimate personal relationship with God, heaven actually comes to you, because nothing can be better than living with God. And whatever you believe is "good" is what you will want to do because that honors God.

That's true as far as it goes.

I left it at that because the article will appear in a string of articles by practicing Christians and I wanted it to be in context with its surroundings. Maybe someone will read it, that way, and think about what I said. I hope so.

But here, where (frankly) I am anonymous, I will go a tad further. We do carry God inside us. A few years ago I found within myself what I have been calling the Contact Point, and I had gone nowhere so it had to be within me. The presence of this Contact Point convinces me that I am already a piece of God and have always been a piece of God. If God is eternal, so am I. How can I be anything else?

So being good in order to get to heaven, in the sense that you don't spend eternity in a fire pit (or, if Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's sendoff of Dante's version of hell can be believed, a pit of . . . well, it's dark and runny and you regularly deposit some of this substance in your bathroom commode), seems to be a nonissue. If you are a piece of God, you will return to that from Whom you came when you shed your physical flesh. Where else could you go?

Does that mean you don't have to be good? (Who defines what is good, anyway?) We are free to choose, good or bad, one way or the other. But I will venture to say that the more you work to act according to what you believe is good, the more aware you will become of the Presence within you, and that is good indeed!