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Tag: christian fiction

A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 14

As I walked through the brilliance of a field now bathed in light, through gentle caressing breezes which flowed over lily and daisy, I basked in the warmth of something I had never known: a love of God.

I now embraced a love and tenderness toward Jesus I had never sought, but now had found.

As I had journeyed from the grave and thought of these things, I had been completely unaware of a stream I had crossed in delight, when suddenly a little girl came running toward me, dragging along a beautiful woman also prancing along behind her.

“Do you remember me?”

I looked at her loving face and smiled.

“You showed me your picture of Heaven,” I recalled as I smiled again.

“This is my mommy!”

I was certain.

“Jesus sent us here to show you the way.”

She beamed in that same love that she had said her mommy had every time she talked about Jesus.

Now I saw this same love in the souls of both child and her beautiful mommy.

“You know what?” she exclaimed.

“JESUS said that we can call God, ‘Daddy.’”

I smiled in joy and reached out my hand to her, THANKFUL that Jesus had sent this little girl to me with a picture of Heaven.

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A Picture of Heaven is dedicated to our beloved daughter, Rachel Katherine Harned, whose mommy died when she was seven. Rachel earned her Master of Arts in Christian Counseling from Wheaton College, currently works for a local hospice and will turn age 21 tomorrow, 21 September, 2013.

Happy Birthday, Rachel.

Your Daddy loves you.

September 20, 2013
A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 6

I swallowed hard and looked away as a tear came to my eye.

Of course, I thought, maybe that’s her mommy in the casket. I had not had time for thought of all of the family connections of my lost loved one.

Friends…dear and rare friends… become just like family. We don’t really know them. They have husbands, wives, kids, moms, grandpas, and all the rest.

“We never really knew him,” I had just heard someone say either of the living relative or another family member who had died.

That’s right. We don’t really know them, do we?

So when the little girl said of a bright star on a picture of Heaven: “That one’s my Mommy,” I had not expected it.

“She’s not REALLY brighter than the other stars…” the little girl said, as I gathered my emotions and attention back into the room. “My mommy’s star is just brighter for me so that I can always see that she is still there.”

I thought about it. And I thought of this little motherless child, who now would no longer have the nurturing embrace of her mother for all of those moments in life when you really need a hug.

(I think another tear started from one eye.)

Then she asked me another question about which I had no idea.

—

Do you know anybody in Heaven?

Wow. I looked nervously about…

“I don’t know.”

I quickly tried to steer our conversation back into the stuff of crayons on paper. “Can we see in your picture?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, “We’ll have to look.”

We both examined her drawing a little more.

“What do YOU see?” she asked as she nuzzled up to me.

(A professional psychologist could not have asked a better question with a Rorschach ink picture.)

I stared into her picture of Heaven…

—

September 10, 2013
A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 3

As I looked about the church, I noticed a former love of my youth and recalled retreat from my initial impression. I looked forward with some hesitation to some later inevitable conversation between us.

I thought of others about whom I had also been quite mistaken: some by positive first impression, others by discovery of time how my negative early pictures of them would be just plain wrong.

As I stared emptily into the high trusses and the stained glass, I recalled: ‘The end of all being is the happiness of man.’

(I think it was from Voltaire or someone like that, from a philosophy class I had nearly failed in college.)

Then I remembered one lover who had said to me, “I’m not happy.” And then it was over.

I also thought of a time when I was confronted with a similar situation by a dear friend saying, “I have no reason to live.”

And I guess that if the reason for man’s existence is happiness, then it could possibly be true. But I had begged my friend at the time to allow me to drive there to talk, and not to do anything rash before I could get there. It would take me almost two hours on dark roads to drive to this place where I had never been.

But reminiscing about these loved ones from days past was not the reason we were here. And I pulled in my attention to the cross at the front of the church.

—
Someone said something about Heaven… then my mind really started wandering.

I looked around the church for some helpful pictures, but thought more of a strange picture from yesterday.

I guess that if you look around at all of the different kinds of churches with their different kinds of cemeteries, you see some oddities of how we think about occasions like this.

Last night was one of those odd sorts of occasions that display the incongruous thinking of some of our customs. This particular place and custom had always been dutifully performed in our family with fear and in trepidation

– the formal visit to the funeral home, for the showing of the body.

September 5, 2013