Can we ever be prepared enough? That depends on two things: first, what we are preparing for, and second, what is the timeframe. 

My trip to Japan is scheduled for the spring of 2025. I have a 450+ day streak going on Duolingo, a language learning app, in order to prepare me for seeing, hearing, and hopefully, understanding the language. The trip is a two-week cruise roundtrip from Tokyo and I plan to spend two nights in the city before boarding the ship. Because I know those first few days I’ll be on my own, being able to communicate the basics will be important. I’ve watched a number of YouTube videos that say just learning the very basics is sufficient since “most” people know English. But other videos that indicate Japanese people are not comfortable speaking English because they don’t use it on a daily basis and feel they don’t speak it well. Will learning the words for please and thank you be enough? 

While I have traveled to other non-English speaking countries, this is the first that uses a character-based alphabet. Correction, three character-based alphabets; and yes, a single word can be written using more than just a single alphabet. Oddly enough, some of the initial words I learned are borrowed from English. While the pronunciation may be a bit more exaggerated, coffee, curry, and cake are relatively the same, just spelled with characters instead of letters. However, as I was learning the sound of the characters, two characters they put together sounded like taco, or at least that’s the way my brain interpreted it. Phonetically it would be more appropriate to represent the word as tako. Instead of those sounds representing the popular Spanish dish, rather it is the pronunciation for the Japanese word for octopus. While I don’t intend to order octopus while I’m there, being prepared will help me avoid thinking I’m ordering tacos and end up with a dish that is nothing like that. 

I’m less than 6 months away from my trip, and while I am looking forward to it, I’m also getting a bit fatigued with the daily language lessons. I’ve started to wonder if it will all be worth it? A work colleague of mine spent the New Year’s holiday there without any of this preparation and told me I’d be fine if I didn’t learn the language. Yet my personality won’t let me stop doing the lessons, even if I know I won’t be able to finish all of them. I’ll probably be waiting at the airport for my flight to Tokyo, using the app on my phone to do a few more Japanese language lessons. 

As I was pondering if I was wasting my time learning the language, I was struck with the thought that if I’m putting all this effort into preparing for a trip that will only last two weeks, how much effort am I putting into preparing for eternity? Yet that is precisely what life is all about: learning about God and His children so that we can spend forever with them in heaven. The Church, Mass, the Bible, and the Catechism are all there to support us in our life’s journey. We practice the language of Love while we are here on earth so that we can better understand heaven when we get there. Love is an action we take in recognition that each person is a reflection of God. In living our faith, actions of Love like the spiritual and corporal works of mercy are teaching us how to think and speak in this eternal language.

Unlike taking a planned trip, we don’t know how long our time on earth is. Even if we live 100 years, have we prepared enough for heaven? Can we prepare too much for heaven, or is that even possible? Perhaps it’s more my personality, but like learning Japanese, I don’t think I will ever be too prepared for heaven. If we get a bit fatigued with our daily preparations for what may be decades before our earthly life ends, we need to remember that our preparation is building a relationship with God. No matter how prepared we think we are, we will only be able to truly appreciate heaven once we get there. And it will be worth all the effort we put in because we will be there with God.