The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre re-envisions hell in his play “No Exit” as a drawing room where three people are trapped together. They await an executioner who will never come and begin to realize that being trapped in one another’s presence is hell. The play concludes with these sobering lines, “You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!”

Sartre has it wrong. Hell is the ultimate estrangement and loneliness. Heaven is perfect community.

In the West we have been taught that the purest form of spirituality is self-led.

I recently sat with a young man whose wife was having an affair on him. She was confused, unsure which partner she wanted to be with: her husband or her boyfriend. Her husband explained that she wouldn’t see a pastor or counselor because she said, “I need to discover myself and find my own way.” We have been sold a lie that the truest version of ourselves is self-discovered. We desperately need others.

Every so often someone will share with me that they don’t have any friends or haven’t found anyone who they think would make a good friend. And so they sit on the sidelines, disengaged from community.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around their experience. I’ve never lived in a place where I didn’t feel disappointed by the fact that we aren’t able to spend meaningful time with all of those we wanted to befriend or that we weren’t able to go deeper in our existing friendships. And many of my deepest regrets are in the ways I’ve failed others relationally: either not investing in relationships locally or not maintaining friendships from a distance.

Some have the faulty notion that relationships will cease when we get to heaven. Whether it is my childhood image of us perpetually singing around the throne of God or the ubiquitous picture of us strumming harps on clouds, relationships are largely omitted in popular conceptions of heaven.

One of the great promises of heaven are the relationships that will be rekindled, the relationships that will be deepened, and the brand new relationships that will be sparked.