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

If we live, we live to the Lord;
and if we die, we die to the Lord.
So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.
                 Romans 14:8

Reading Lewis's words, I thought of an interview John and I had had some ten years before. Martin Luther King Jr. was uppermost in my mind just then anyway: three days earlier this thirty-nine-year-old Baptist pastor had been murdered as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Few men in our time, I thought, had left a greater mark on their comer of the earth than he had!

My overwhelming impression on meeting him, however, had been of a man "occupied with heaven." When John and I had arrived at his home in Montgomery, Alabama, in November 1958, he was recovering from a near-fatal stabbing. Two years earlier he had spearheaded a boycott of Montgomery's segregated buses, the first large-scale civil rights action in the twentieth century. Though his weapons were nonviolence and love, a storm of hatred burst about him. Thirty or forty threatening phone calls and letters a day, his wife and baby daughter threatened, his home bombed.

For a full year, Dr. King had refused to quit. When bus segregation ended in Montgomery, he wrote a book about the effectiveness of peaceful protest. He was in a department store in New York City, signing copies, when a deranged black woman plunged a razor-sharp letter opener deep into his chest.

By the time of our visit two months after the stabbing, he was allowed to leave his bed for meals, and he and Mrs. King had invited us for lunch. Two memories of the meal stood out. The first was my introduction to collard greens, about which my kindest thought was that it must be an acquired taste. Since the end of the meal meant the end of the interview, however, I accepted a second helping ... a third ...

The other memory was the experience, equally new to me, of meeting a man who cared passionately about conditions in this world because his citizenship was in another. About passion for justice I'd learned from Grandfather, about a world beyond this one I had not. This was when heaven for me was still in the realm of myth; Dr. King's lack of concern for his own safety seemed incomprehensible. He had no doubt, he told us, that in another place, on another street, in another town, the knife or the bomb or the bullet would find him. Meanwhile, he would not avoid public places, would not carry a gun, would not wear a bulletproof vest.