Paradise

I teach English to a 13 year old girl once a week in suburban Paris. Last time I was there I made a game of words and letters, she was to pronounce the words correctly and make two sentences with each of them. I had written the word "heaven", and after she'd practised pronouncing it, she said: what's that?

This is a really smart girl, and who comes from a non-Christian family.
"You mean you've never heard it before?"
She shook her head. I tried explaining the word for her. It was actually hard.
I tried explaining it in terms of the sky, and the heaven being a more spiritual aspect of this.
How do you explain heaven?

"You know God, angels..? It's were they are, where they belong." Still no reaction.
"You mean you don't know God?" I asked.
She hesitated, but still didn't answer, like she was trying hard to come up with an answer but couldn't find any.

"okay," I said, "let's look it up." Looking up words in the French-English dictionary is sort of the last solution, the idea is to solve it with an English-English translation first (the way I've been tortured in French and struggled through exams with for three semesters).
The French translation read: 'ciel/paradis' - sky or paradise.
"Aah," she said, "now I understand. Paradis!" Yet she still couldn't figure out God. I asked her to make two sentences, and without hesitating, she answered:

1. Nice people go to heaven.

2. Heaven exists.


She could have said heaps of other things. Heaven is where angels live. Heaven is the same as paradise.
Yet she said: heaven exists. Even tho she couldn't grasp the idea of God properly.
I thought it was rather nice!