It seems to me that the meaning of life and meaning in life are two different things. The meaning of life implies that we are here to fulfill some kind of holy mission as part of some grand design or plan, while meaning in life gives us a reason to get up in the morning. When people complain that their life has no meaning, it implies that they are just going though the motions with no clear direction or goal. The meaning of life is primarily the domain of philosophers and theologians, while almost anybody can find meaning in their lives if they want to. It would seem that things like Italian beefs and other temporal pleasures have little to do with either type of meaning, I would classify them as diversions. Nothing wrong with that if that's all you want to do but, if you want something meaningful, I don't think you'll find it there.
What many Christians think they believe about Heaven is not consistent with what the Bible says about it. In the Old Testament, Heaven is the domain of God and his angels. The only mortal I remember going to Heaven was Elijah, and he is, or was, supposed to come back some day. Satan and his angels used to live there two, but they tried to pull a coup and take over, which resulted In them getting kicked out. Well that part is actually in the New Testament book of Revelation ("Apocalypse" in Greek), but it's not clear if the author (John the Revelator) means Satan's rebellion and subsequent expulsion have already happened in the past or are predicted to happen in the future. If it's ancient history, it seems like it should have been mentioned in the Old Testament, but I don't think it was. At any rate, Satan was not kicked out of Heaven into Hell, that comes later. He was sent to inhabit the Earth for a thousand years, although that's probably an allegorical number. During this time he either has, or will, lead as many people astray as he can. Meanwhile, the Christians are charged with recruiting as many people as they can to their cause.
The Book of Revelation reads like a surrealistic nightmare, which may well have been its inspiration. It's full of cryptic symbolism, which may or may not have made sense to the people of the time, and theologians have been arguing over its interpretation ever since. The bottom line seems to be that, eventually, Jesus will come back to Earth and judge the living and the resurrected dead. Satan and his angels, along with all the converts he has recruited during his time on Earth, will be cast into Hell once and all. A relatively small number of the good guys, known as "The Elect", will float up to Heaven, and the rest of us will inherit God's Kingdom on Earth.
Most of the remarks about the afterlife that have been attributed to Jesus seem to be consistent with John the Revelator's version, minus all the cryptic symbolism. Jesus never wrote anything that we know of, so all of His quotations come from secondary sources, some of which knew Him personally, and some of which did not. John the Revelator is believed to be the same John who wrote the Gospel of John, and the same John who was an actual disciple of Jesus. If so, I don't know why he had to experience a revelatory dream or hallucination to understand the Resurrection. It seems like Jesus would have already told him all that he needed to know about the subject.
I think it's unlikely that all the comments Jesus ever made about the Resurrection are quoted in the Bible, but one of them that is predicts that the event is going to happen within the lifetime of some of His disciples: "This generation will not pass away before all these things have come to pass." Christians took this literally for centuries, but were finally forced to confront the reality that it hadn't happened according to schedule. What they seem to have done is reinterpret the prophesy. The fundamentalists still believe, even unto this day, that, when Jesus said "this generation", he meant "our generation", and each new generation expects it to happen in their lifetimes. The non-fundamentalists seem to have put the Apocalypse on the back burner and focused their attention on the personal salvation of individual people. Although they regularly recite the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene creed, both of which refer to "the resurrection of the body" and the eventual return of Jesus to "judge the quick and the dead", if you ask most parishioners about it they will tell you that they expect their soul to leave their body and float up to Heaven immediately after they die. This notion may have come from the Greeks or the Persians but, wherever it came from, it wasn't the Bible.
This discrepancy was first brought to my attention by Rev. Anderson at an MYF meeting, but it took years for it to really sink in and, after being confirmed by additional research, lead to my drifting away from the Christian faith. The last I heard of Rev. Anderson, he had quit his job at Elsdon and gone back to divinity school, believing that he needed to learn more than he already knew about this stuff before trying to teach it to others.
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