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

It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while he is the End of our journey, he is also at every stopping place.

Elisabeth Elliot

To know that good will come - this is to perceive heaven around us here and now. I have a friend who learned to do this in a salty land indeed. For fifteen years Barbara Holmes suffered excruciating back pain that nothing relieved, not medication or acupuncture or biofeedback or eight surgical operations. In her pain Barbara learned to listen to God and to write down his promises.

In 1996 she had a miraculous healing. Long before this, though, good had come to Barbara in that ability to hear God. She continues to write down the messages she receives "because I know they're not just for me."

She didn't know I was writing about journeys when from her home in Delaware she sent me the message she'd heard on March 10, 2000.

The path you see is crooked and bent and crowded with weeds. And you feel detoured and confused. But the path you see as crooked, I see as straight. In spite of the obstacles, I see you on the path headed straight to me. Do not despair about the crookedness. For in the bends I place great blessings.

John and I did not know about the "blessings in the bends" as he began those monthly checkup visits to the third floor of Sloane-Kettering. It became a kind of ritual. Always both of us together. Line up Mrs. Coolidge. Take a fistful of coins for the parking meter. No silent prayers, in those days, for the others waiting with us. Just: That woman... the whole side of her face... what if...