Offspring

An experiment never meant for the meek nor faint of heart:

Ask your father a question. Ask him to think back, to consider you as the child you were. Then ask him what he would choose if given the opportunity to change but one something about you--the person you were, the way you treated others, what you thought or believed, how you acted or refused to act. Let him think. Then, listen.

When he tells you his greatest wish is that you would have treated your sister better, consider why. Consider how his love for her--every bit his own joy as you are--mirrors your own. Then lift that same listening heart and soul heavenward.

Never come to that eternal place of reckoning, that destination of accountability, with pent-up praise of always knowing God and loving God and wanting nothing more than to make God happy at any cost only to hear those same devastating words:

I know, I just wish you would have shown love to my children.

Places Worth Crying

Tears belong to heaven. So casually considered, an idea pervades this training ground declaring tears to be no more. Yet heaven is no place worth being if such is so, and God knows far better than to allow it.

The architect of all divine destination promises to wipe away all tears. Yet what tear can be wiped away that is not formed, that is not overpowered with emotion and laid sacrifice to consciousness beyond the common kind? Hoping against such tears forfeits all but the truest reason to shed them, silently.

When heaven nearest touches earth, tears roll. That glorious moment of perfection spent, and far too soon fleeting, demands tears. So even heaven, timeless as it may be, must afford that same grace. To assume for a moment that such a place might exist without that otherworldly wonder known only through clouded eyes is to relegate the eternal hopelessly beyond its natural place, without ever knowing it.

Rolling

Science class taught us all something that never seemed to make much sense. The textbooks called it potential energy, some idea that a ball sitting motionless atop some hill has more energy than the same still ball at bottom of said hill. Some lesson, we all thought.

Then we grew a little, we lived a little. We struggled through tremendous times of trouble and celebrated pure moments of victory. And we did it all along the great, eternal ebb and flow known by anyone who lives. Then, at some point, that little ball atop the hill began making sense.

Never did the ball below change for us, but the one with all the energy did. Because even our greatest moments of joy and purpose always hold that potential for lesser things. It is as if the ball possesses more than mere energy to fall, but the knowledge that it must.

That lesson never makes the textbook. It never makes any book. It only makes its mark on lives that choose to learn it, and more so still on lives that do not.