Love and Death

A lot of books have been written about heaven. My favorite is A Travel Guide to Heaven, by Anthony DeStefano. The author speculates that God doesn’t create good things only to watch them die, so we will likely always have Paris. In other books, authors report actual experience. They have made a round trip, died and gone to heaven and come back to life. Ninety Minutes in Heaven, by Don Piper and Cecil Murphey, Flight to Heaven, by Dale Black, Return from Tomorrow by George G. Ritchie are among them.
I’m wondering why all these books are written by men. Do women not experience heavenly fly-bys? The men all express regret at having to return to earth; are women better at talking their way in?
There is surprising harmony among the accounts I’ve read. That God is light and love seems literal. He seems to speak a language of math and science. The eternal musical score is pleasing. The absence of sin is palpable. Newcomers are anticipated and welcome. It sounds as if Heaven hums with purposeful activity.
These accounts offer only peeks through the gates; different authors noticed different things – vegetation, villages, habitats, heavenly beings, but they all experienced unity and oneness.
In Heaven, we’re told by those who have tasted and seen God’s goodness, time doesn’t frogmarch a weary, frustrated population, nor does it stand still.
I haven’t read Ritchie’s book, written in 1978, but my friend Teri sent me this:

The last paragraph is "God is busy building a race of men who know how to love. I believe that the fate of the earth itself depends on the progress we make - and that the time now is very short. As for what we'll find in the next world, here too I believe that what we'll discover there depends on how well we get on with the business of loving, here and now."

When we watch the nightly news and wonder how we will ever dig ourselves out of an economic and moral deficit that threatens to undo us all, we would do well to remember that the business of loving is a profitable, high yield business with healthy returns that are not dependent on current economic and political conditions. That’s good news.

Smile

No smile is so candid as that of a man or woman with Alzheimer's disease. To look full in the smiling face of one who has been robbed of higher function is to glimpse a soul now unblemished by pretense. Stripped of sophistication, their smiles often mask confusion, but sometimes radiate a young child's joy.
This morning from my place in the choir I watched Gene stretch an enthusiastic hand out to greet Phyllis as he made his way up the aisle ahead of his faithful wife Kay. A sweet grin spread across his face, testifying to his recollection that God's house is a good place to be, in fellowship with others.
We opened our books to sing and I caught the eye of Judy, whose powerful soprano voice has been silenced by this awful illness. Delight registered on her face as she seemed to recall from somewhere in the depth of her being the breath before the first note.
When the trinity of body, mind and spirit is broken, when the mind goes, we often say the person is gone. Truly, the person we knew is in the process of going, and it is agony for the family. But those smiles are postcards to those left behind, reminding us that the ones we love will one day repossess their minds in the new heaven and earth.
Surely the God who knit us together in the womb retains the pattern of our being and will restore us to health, as he did his own Son.