Life Is A Journey

The days of our lives are closing in on one year since our beloved left the Earth behind. I think about her every day. No one or nothing can fill the hole her absence has left in our hearts. A couple of weeks ago, we were across the street at Dan's house enjoying his beautiful back yard. A perfect southern California day. Tyler was alone in the jacuzzi and I was watching him. He looked up into the sky and shouted, mommy mommy mommy. Yesterday, I talked to Val's big brother Jeff, shown in the attached picture. He told me that he thinks about her a lot and has had times of sadness as April 15th approaches. I reminded him that God chose him, not us, to be with her when she died. If you want to be reminded of the measure of a man that Jeff became, go back to his "Tribute To Val" video that was posted on Jun 1, 2007. And just this weekend, Nancy came home from a Beth Moore Seminar at Cox Arena. Someone behind her shouted, "mom". To Nancy, it sounded like Val. She, Julie, and Val attended many seminars together in years gone by.

We all miss Val in our own way.

In his Preface to "The Great Divorce", C.S. Lewis said this; "But what, you ask, of Earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be a very distinct place. I think Earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region of Hell; and Earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself."

Not only this valley that we are in, but all our earthly past will have been Heaven to the saved. Once attained, Heaven will work backwards and turn all the sorrows of this life into glory. This transformation begins even before our physical death. The saved man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven. And that is why, at the end of all things, as the sun rises on that distant shore, the Blessed of God will say, "we have always been here". What seemed as we entered it to be a veil of misery and a salt desert, as we look back, will have been, in truth, pools full of water.

Here is picture of our boys. They are all in christian schools. Ryan and Gavin are playing baseball. Pray for Chris. he has a big job raising these indians. Pray for his health, back pain and Crohn's Disease. Pray for Christine, their Nanny.