A Trillion Images of Heaven In the Reality of Earth

FAMILY celebrations don’t always work out as we plan.  Many end up with loved ones warring with each other.  New wounds are inflicted or old ones are reopened.  So much senseless grief and pain.  There is hardly a more salient love than familial love — hurts more than it should, and we forgive more than we should.  Rightly or wrongly, all this came to me in a single moment’s vision.

Then another vision: a family photograph of someone else’s family.  Like all photographs, a moment is captured as if to fix that image as a solid reminder of history.  The picture tells a thousand stories.  But, simply this…

We’re all passing away.  The day comes soon when we’ll be gone, in deed.

Death.  Do you think about it much?  Not in a morbid sense.  In a historical sense.  In a factual sense.  It will occur you know.  It’s only a matter of time.  But what about now… what about the time between now and death, where you have choice in how to act and respond?  Through this lens, what changes can you now commit to making?

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Those family factions that occur, where birds of the same feather flock together… these, too, are times that are passing away.  Soon they’ll be gone, and history will be written, forever, like the photograph, etched in fact.  The moment for writing will be gone.  It is thereby written.  Done.

Why do we not instead choose to love?  And where love is unrequited, as we should expect rejection to come, however callous it feels to us, why do we react?  It’s not the rejection that matters.  All that matters is having little to regret.  All that matters is having a firm grasp on the facts of history as they’ll one day be told telling of how free we were to love and hate.  Do we ever stand apart from ourselves, as if to judge ourselves from a third party’s viewpoint?  We would do well to.  What would we honestly say about ourselves?

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I want you to think; to think as God has made me think… of the regrets of family and friendship relationships that went awry.  Where hurts were ushered harshly and responded to with disdain.  Oh, what a horrible state of affairs!

We were made for more.  Bearers of the Creator’s image, we were made for more… to stop violence in its tracks; to beget restraint for compulsion, sagacity for selfishness, peace for violence.

A trillion images.  That’s one life.  A life in the reality of history written on earth.  These trillion images are indelibly written.  They’re eternal.  What will we be satisfied to write?

We write our history of life through indelible images historically factual.  Don’t regret later what you can reconcile now.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.