Almost Heaven.........

"All endings are beginnings.

We just don't know it at the time......"

Mitch Ablom, Five People You Meet in Heaven.

Sitting on top of a pile of books left behind by others who had stayed in the cottage we occupied for a couple of days was one I had thought about reading in the past but never got around to it. It's one of the things I love about cottages. They are filled with reading material (or should be) which may be different from the assortment found on your own shelves and side tables at home. Old magazines with cover stories that have come and gone, travel guides, classics and murder mysteries familiar to a reader's eye are haphazardly piled together. The thing in common is that for the most part they were used as a method of escape or a way to slide into vacation mode. Why were they left behind if that was not the case? Wouldn't the owner take it home with them if it held meaning to them to place on their bookshelf with the others?

Sometimes, (though when I think about it, this seems to have happened to me more than sometimes) you find a timely more meaningful little nugget left behind. Initially, you pick it up thinking it will simply be entertainment only to realize it has a lingering effect. The message from the story stays with you. The character slips under your skin. And you quickly realize your perceptions may have been nudged in a slightly different direction than you had anticipated.



And you wonder........hmmmm.........why was that particular book left behind? Who also held it in their hands? Did the story leave a lasting impression with them too and they wanted to allow it to weave it's magic for someone else, or was it simply a toss away? Have I just noticed it amongst the others and have allowed it to float to the top of the pile because of where my own head is at right now? Would I have picked up the Maeve Binchy book first had I not already read it? Probably........ Good thing I had already read all of Maeve's books. Out of the dozen or so sitting in the pile which I had never read, I chose the right one. Or it chose me......



It chose me.........and for a few hours I found myself immersed in the recent afterlife of a guy named Eddie, a man who had struggled all his life with his bitterness of leading a life he never anticipated. Like many of us, he felt like he had no control over how his time on earth unfolded. Circumstances, obligations and events took precedence, washing over personal aspirations, creating a tug of war between wants and what really happens. Big unmet goals which would have taken him down a very different path fueled Eddie's anger. Instead, his life seemed completely unfulfilled in his mind......until he died and was given an opportunity to learn that ordinary has great meaning.



Ordinary is not how we seem to define it because we all have a life with purpose. Our "ordinary lives" are blessed by the journeys and destinations we travel to and from and by the people we have an opportunity to walk with along the way. It may not seem so blessed while we plough our fields and tend to our daily routines.....while we struggle with hardships and frustrations.....while we encounter painful times which can be blinding, so much so that we can't see any purpose or any reason for why things happen the way they do. In fact, it may not be visible to us while we are right in the middle of living....to many distractions and too many times we allow ourselves to be swallowed up by regrets and a sense of unfairness. And yet.................perhaps we are given a glimpse of what it all meant as we journey to Heaven. That is the premise of this little gem of a book.


Five People You Meet in Heaven was the story of Eddie's journey to understanding that what we perceive as ordinary has many layers of extra. Not only is there a sense of interconnectiveness, perhaps with people who seem to play peripheral roles in our lives from a surface observation, there may be a much deeper meaning to our average feeling lives. Eddie was given an opportunity to meet five very different people who had passed on before him, who for one reason or another had a message to pass onto him before they were allowed to move onto a full afterlife. Suspended in timelessness, they waited to share a story or two and to offer Eddie a chance to learn how to forgive himself and others........mercy which is only possible when one has been offered new insights.



Who knows what we will find in Heaven, or how it will look and feel like......I certainly don't have a clue, but I like to think that it will be a place "where the streets have no names," where racism and class systems are completely non-existant. Heaven isn't something I dwell on unless I'm asked by one of my children what I think it looks like. But, this story of Eddie gave me a chance to think about it a little more expansively.....so now if I am asked by someone what my thoughts are on Heaven? I will add to my description the hope that it is a place where the people in our lives......the ones we know well, and the ones whom we may cross paths with very quickly will be there to greet me and to share a few insights as to why things happened in my life the way they did. Where "extra" is added to "ordinary."



In the meantime.........

To everything there is a season............and a time for every purpose under Heaven.......



reap and sow........and plant some more.

Gee, I'm glad the book was left behind for someone like me to find........and it sits on top of the cottage pile for the next person to read..........