A few weeks ago, someone posed this question to me.  If we are in heaven and one of our loved ones is not, and if heaven is supposed to be a place of endless joy and bliss, won't our remembering this loved one be less than blissful if he or she is not in heaven with us?
     It's a difficult question.  The prophet Isaiah quotes God as saying that one day, a day on the other side of the divide between temporality and eternity, the "former things" will not be remembered, that what we had previously known we will know no longer.  This assertion begs more questions.  Does this mean that we will not remember everything that we had loved about this earthly existence?  Doesn't memory make us who we are? Who we are today, we are because of who we were yesterday, and who we were the day before that, and who we were the day before that, and so on.  Given this, what will we be like on the other side if everything, good or bad, that had made or brought us to this point is vanished and gone?  And what does God mean when he says that, "I am making all things new"?
     Though it is hard to say with certainty, I will note that God's newness is different from newness as we think about newness.  God's newness is something that is so radically new (and this is the thrust of the Hebrew and Greek words for "new") that it is totally unlike and not dependent upon anything that came before it.  It is the new in the truest sense of the word.  It is not the paradigm shift of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, not Europe's discovery of the Americas, not a birthday we have not had before.  All of these build upon what had preceded them.  God's newness does not.  While it recognizes the past, it is a future totally apart from it.
     This applies to memory, too.  What and how we will remember on the other side will be new, new in a way we cannot imagine, new as we cannot conceive newness in this broken yet purposeful existence.  It will be blissful, it will be wonderful, and it will be new.  God loves us, and God loves our loved ones.  But how he brings all this together we cannot now fully fathom.
     That's why like Job, we can only say, "I know that you [God] can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.  Speak, and I will listen."
     Sometimes, that's all we can do.