Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

I'm sorry that it took me more than thirty years to meet this God who walks at our side. In the Unitarian church I'd learned about God's majesty, his moral demands, his truth reflected in many traditions - and I'm forever grateful for these insights. But ... to imagine this infinite God giving individual attention to just one of billions of human creatures on a speck of a planet at the edge of a minor galaxy?

Because I couldn't imagine it doesn't mean of course that he wasn't attending to me, every moment of my life. An infant has no concept of the mother who holds him. But I stayed an infant so long! How much joy I missed by failing to perceive his arms beneath me. How much I still miss when I fail to see him throughout the day.

Heaven lies around each of us, closer than the air we breathe, this very moment. It's the growing awareness of this immanent heaven - like all human awareness, always partial, always capable of more - that I've come to see as the single Christian story, whatever the difference in details.

The details are important too, though. It's in the specifics of our stories that we discover just how personal God's dealing with us is - so tailored to each alone that there are as many ways of taking his outstretched hand as there are individuals.

For me, the awareness began with that cross-country car trip in 1959.

That June, as soon as school was out, we'd piled the kids, ages eight, five, and three, into our gray Ford station wagon and set out to zigzag twelve thousand miles across the country, interviewing interesting people.

President Truman in Missouri. John Paul Stapp in New Mexico, "the fastest man on earth," who rode a rocket sled to simulate bailing out of the new jet fighters. Alfred Hitchcock in Los Angeles. Governor Mark Hatfield in Oregon. Homesteaders in Alaska.

In between these scheduled stops, we did what we'd done ever since our first writing trips in Europe, typewriter strapped to John's bicycle. Go to a local newspaper office and ask to see the "morgue," the storeroom where back issues of a paper were kept in the days before microfilm.