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

I call it the route ahead a path because that's how I've come to think of this journey. We're not making a swift trip on an Interstate, slicing through mountains and leaping rivers, but following a winding trail, intimate, often rough, the route ahead usually obscured by undergrowth. We cannot hurry to heaven; we can only go as fast as our particular landscape allows. The verb saunter, Thoreau tells us, comes from the French sainte terre, holy ground. It's the pace at which he walked the paths at Walden Pond, the pace a traveler must take along the Way

For some, the path at least is well marked. I remember Billy Graham's wife, Ruth, telling me once that she couldn't recall a time when she didn't know Jesus.

We were sitting by the wood fire in the eat-in kitchen of the Grahams' rustic home in Little Piney Cove, North Carolina, working on a book for children and discussing what concept of heaven a six-year-old would have. The daughter of missionaries, Ruth had grown up in the rural China of the old warlord days, where the Christian community lived in a high-walled compound. Outside the walls was a world of very visible evil -- rich landlords and starving peasants, bribe-taking judges, legal torture, little girls sold into slavery. Within the compound walls, by contrast, were kindness, love, dignity. Microcosms of hell and heaven.

"I had no trouble, at six, picturing either place," Ruth said. "Nor understanding that it was Jesus who made the difference."

The world I grew up in, on the other hand, I told her, revealed no such distinction between godly and ungodly. All the citizens of Scarsdale, New York, to a child's eyes anyway, were equally law-abiding. If some of them went to church, they seemed no different from the rest.

God. . . Jesus. . . heaven. . . such things were never talked about at our house. I remember only one religious discussion with either of my parents all the while I was growing up. The summer I was