A little old lady in Glasgow: What is the essence of being a Christian?

Thirty-something years ago I lived in Glasgow, Scotland; in one of those (rather handsome) four-storey, red sandstone, tenement flats that form most of the housing in that city. These are in pairs, one on the left and the other on the right side of the stairwell - which opens to the street.

I was a single young man, teaching Anatomy at the university; and opposite me lived a little old lady, a spinster - probably in her seventies - and I would sometimes (but nothing like as often as I should have) visit her, have a cup of coffee, and talk. 

She struck me as a rather typical of her ilk, being a Presbyterian of the Church of Scotland - whose favourite reading was the cozy, 'couthy' and heart-warming productions of the DC Thomson publishers from Dundee - the Sunday Post newspaper, The People's Friend magazine and annual, and moral or uplifting verse by the poetess Patience Strong (a pen name, as you will have guessed). 

These meant a great deal to her, and she would read out passages, and occasionally lend me something she thought was especially good.  

In response to my (then atheist) enquiry about why she was a Christian; she once said something about her faith, the gist of which I found very striking at the time and have always remembered. 

This was that she was a Christian because of the promise of going to Heaven - without which she could not continue in life. 

But she actually put it the other way around - without the hope of going to Heaven after death, she would not find her life worth living. 

At the time I found this rather pitiful; and I regarded it as simply wishful thinking from someone (much less intelligent and experienced than myself) whose life was so lonely, restricted and lacking in interest that she needed to fabricate this sentimental fantasy. 

I also judged that she was not a 'real Christian' because eternal life was not what it was all-about. Life, I believed, was about making the most of our mortal years; and stoically accepting that there was nothing else. 

I thought she was just making-up a consoling but pretend religion to suit herself, rather than understanding the bleak truth of existence. 

Nowadays, however, I believe that little old lady was wiser than me, and was just plain right about the true nature of real Christianity.

I am also sure that her sincere desire for eternal life in Heaven was exactly what was required for her to go there after death - and what made sense of her quiet and solitary mortal life. 

And I hope to tell her exactly this, some day.