If It Were Happening to Us…

From the window of a waiting train we watched a young mother with two young daughters, all dressed in their best, eagerly, anxiously looking at passengers arriving. And then there was a light in their eyes as there came into view the one they were waiting for⎯the father, who completed the family circle: then running steps, and arms wide open, and arms tightly closed around one another, with every one talking, and everyone looking lovingly at everyone as they walked to the waiting car. Father had come home. Mother and children were there. All were together again.

If there is a picture in life sweeter than a sincerely loving family circle, we haven’t seen it. Nor do we expect to see a happier picture this side of heaven. But just such scenes of wonderful reunion assuredly will be a most important part of the highest blessings of heaven, as we return to loved ones waiting.

God has not deceived us, nor placed in us a false expectancy as concerning things that mean the most. Our Lord and Saviour simply said, “I go to prepare a place for you…that where I am, there you may be also.” That was not merely a promise of remembrance, but of the reality of reunion.

Scripture is filled with such assurance. Why should we quarrel with it⎯for there is a God in heaven, who made us in His image, whose children we are, who has given us life and love and loved ones, not to be done away in a moment, but to go on from here always and forever.

This doesn’t make parting easy. Parting from loved ones isn’t ever altogether easy. But the parting called death is not final nor futile, for He who has given us life here, has also given us life hereafter. This we can count on, as we stand by the graves of loved ones laid away.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh has given us this thoughtful sentence: “Who is not afraid of pure space⎯that breath-taking empty space of an open door? But despite fear, one goes through to the room beyond.”
Death is also such a door⎯not a door that merely closes upon the past, but a door we walk through to more light to more living, to loved ones whose eyes will light at our coming, and we shall know that we are home again, as once we were.