A Glimpse of Heaven

I enter this Holy Week with a great sadness.  A young couple I know has lost their 2 year-old little girl.  She had a congenital heart defect and was on the list to receive a new heart.  It just was not to be.

This great tragedy is compounded by the fact that her four year old brother died one year ago this month from the same ailment.  It was not even known at the time he had the condition until he collapsed at a sporting event and died subsequently.  

In praying for the young couple, I was at a loss for words.  What solace could there possibly be for the loss of 2 precious children?  How could someone ever get over something like that.  Even silence,  tears, and moans could do no justice to so great a tragedy.  But what came to me, in that expression to God, was a plea for heaven.  If the young couple could just see a glimpse of the place their children now lived.  If they could see the face of Jesus and the love He has for their babies.  The heavenly host who have so wrapped their love and their support around these two darlings - perhaps that would be of some comfort.

As the week has progressed, I thought of another parent.  How did God perceive this Holy Week we are traveling through?  How does a parent watch and wait for what He knows will unfold?  How can He know that He will literally sit on His hands and that His will is for His Son to do the same?  What pain and agony!  A torturous death that could in all actuality be avoided.  And for what?  A world that would scorn, scoff and curse His name not only in that moment but for thousands of years to come? 

Was that glimpse of heaven what sustained them?  Did God realize in a few short days, His Son would be released from the earthly bonds He had submitted Him to thirty three years prior.  Was He picturing Jesus once again joining Him, sitting at His right hand, ruling with Him over heaven and earth?

And was the fact that this one act of sacrifice on the parts of them both, would open heaven's gates in a way that nothing else had, would, or could.  That the division between perfection and imperfection, sinner and saint, good and evil - all would be bridged by the very act of their mutual suffering and pain.  The same glimpse of heaven would become a reality for us all. 

I am sitting here loved, saved, and sanctified because They did!

Alleluia!!