Happiness in heaven

I recently read a blog post that posed the question, "How will I possibly be happy in heaven if I know my friends and family are in hell?  How can heaven be heaven if that's the case?"

Here is my response to that:

The gift of eternal life as described in the Bible is about spending an eternity with Jesus Christ.  That is why Paul says in Philippians 3:8,

"I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him."

Paul said everything is loss compared to knowing Christ and when we leave the perishable and put on the imperishable and the mortal puts on immortality (1 Corinthians 15:54) we will be able to know Christ fully and everything you have lost in this life along with every worry, concern, stress, disability, fear, pain you have felt will not be remembered for the joy you will be enveloped in.  Paul called this "an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17).  As Isaiah 65:17 says,

"For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind."

In his essay Transposition C.S. Lewis observes that for most people "our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art.  Against all these, to be sure, we set one positive: the vision and enjoyment of God.  And since this is an infinite good, we hold (rightly) that it outweighs them all." 

I should also mention that the disciples were not eager to go to heaven--at least that wasn't their ultimate goal--they were eager to be resurrected in glorified bodies when Christ returns.  That's why Paul continues in Philippians 3:10-11 and says his motivation in life is "that I may know him [Christ] and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."