I think you’re right. In fact, I have strong intimations that it’s only a matter of seeing or knowing, and perhaps that’s the really hard part. In other words, perhaps you don’t make it to God because you were never away, although it suits the interests of institutional power many thousands of years back and up to the present to make us think otherwise. It is far more likely that our lives can be directly inspired by God than any books or dogma can be inspired by God, which implies in the first place that the authors were inspired by God anyway, which in turn implies that you can too, and in a much more direct way. There would be no purpose for any of us to be born if it were otherwise. It has to be about our own direct experience, or so I would think. Anyone trying to draw straight lines such as that in a world like ours has it all wrong.
All the best!