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

1f I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
       C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity

I was not a happy child.

It's strange how hard that sentence is for me to write. Not that it's untrue. Just that setting it down seems a betrayal of cherished parents.

It's Daddy who would have been most dismayed to read those words. Mother would certainly have disapproved of airing so private a matter. "I'm sure we all have our troubles, dear. No one wants to hear about someone else's."

But Daddy. . . Though he died more than fifty years ago, I can hear his cry of bafflement as though he were reading over my shoulder. Not happy! With a loving family, good health, material blessings beyond anything he dreamed of in his own childhood! He liked to relate how as a boy he'd be sent to the butcher shop, clutching the dime that was to buy meat for their family of nine. "Don't forget to ask the butcher," his mother would call after him, "to throw in the liver for the cat!"

They didn't have a cat.

How could a child as fortunate as I, fail to be happy?

How could I, years later as a young wife and mother, be anything but fulfilled and content? When in 1952 I was diagnosed with clinical depression, Daddy was outraged. "You have no right to be sad!"

He enumerated the reasons: "A husband who loves you, beautiful kids, a nice home. And you can have a steak anytime you want one!"

It was all true. That is the terror of depression, the dark mystery I could not explain either to him or to myself. You can have a steak anytime you want one. The words have become shorthand for John and me, for all the things that ought to make a difference and don't.

Not that there weren't lots of happy times in my childhood. But as I trace the journey to heaven to its beginnings, a sad-eyed little girl too often looks out from the snapshots.

In her books Catherine Marshall often wrote of the carefree days of childhood. As Catherine's editor for over twenty years, I would often put a question mark by these passages. Even for youngsters less moody than I, I didn't believe childhood was tension free. The specifics of my experience are only variations in our common story.

Like Catherine, I was the oldest of three children -- the responsible eldest. "You're in charge now." In charge of getting the playroom