Once Upon a Time: Discovering Our Forever After Story Read online

  • The primary job of angels is to worship God in heaven. We also see them delivering messages, like the visits to Mary and to Joseph announcing that Jesus would be born. They guide us, as they did Cornelius in Acts 10. They sometimes provide for physical needs, like they did for Christ in Matthew 4:11. They protect us. This is the job we most often think of—guardian angels. The Bible often talks about the angels keeping watch over us. Sometimes they get us out of trouble, as they did for Peter in Acts 12. And, in death, they care for us and escort us into eternity, just as they did for Lazarus in Luke 16:22.

  • Angels are nothing like the cherubic, rosy-cheeked infants we often see in paintings or as images affixed to modern-day giftware. They are spirits, though we know they can take the form of human-like bodies. Hebrews 13:2 implies this when it says, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” Many times we read about them in frightening terms—like lightning, and with garments whiter and more dazzling than anything known in our world. And when angels make appearances, they generally appear in the form of men.

  THE SEEN AND UNSEEN

  One of my favorite things to do is to include the unseen world in my stories. If you’ve read my fiction you probably know three of my readers’ favorite characters are the angels Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy. Three angels who protect, guide, and, well, intrude on the lives of mere mortals. Are they theologically correct? Of course not—it’s fiction. Storytelling. Nowhere in the Bible do we see female-seeming angels (though who’s to say they couldn’t take on that form?). And nowhere in the Bible do we see the trouble sometimes caused by these three. But I’ve enjoyed writing the angel books because they demonstrate, in a fun way, that God cares about our lives and intervenes. As a nod to authenticity, I’m adding a male angel in the next book, Angels at the Table. Why add another angel, you ask? It just seemed like a fun addition to the trio. And because the names Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy are adaptations from verse 6 of the beloved twenty-third psalm, the new angel’s name is Will. (Surely goodness and mercy will follow you . . .)

  A GLIMPSE INTO THE UNSEEN WORLD

  Every now and then we get a glimpse into the unseen world. Skeptics doubt the near-death experiences that get reported, but surely there are too many of these stories, with too many similarities, to be discounted wholesale.

  Those who care for the dying say that at the end of life, the dividing line between the known world and the unseen world becomes very thin. Some call it the “Thin Places.” Don’t you love that description? Research shows that when they are nearing death, people often seem to begin an organic process of confronting unfinished issues. It’s not unusual in the days or weeks before death for the dying person to report being visited by long-gone relatives, friends, or other people. Often the purpose of these visits as reported is to help the dying person “let go.” Others report going on journeys to otherworldly realms, or the caretakers will see them stare at a certain point in the room and then break into a look of sheer amazement. My mother was with her sister Paula when she died, and just seconds before she passed from life to death, my aunt Paula’s eyes widened with sheer wonder, as if she had caught a glimpse of the new life that awaited her in heaven.

  DOES THIS MEAN WE ALL GO TO HEAVEN?

  Many Christians discount these stories because the moment of eternity—of seeing the great light—seems to indiscriminately come to those who are followers of Jesus as well as to those who’ve rejected Him. That does not seem to track with what popular culture teaches. We’ve all seem cinematographic images of some people whisked away to heaven and others, like in the movie Ghost, being sucked into hell.

  It’s true that not everyone will go to heaven. We know from reading the Bible that the Lord does not push the kingdom of heaven onto anyone. It’s a matter of free will, and we do have to act upon the invitation in order to spend eternity in heaven. But we also know that eternity is for everyone, whether we choose heaven or not. We will all live forever in the unseen realms. And when we die, we will all see heaven, because we will stand before the throne of judgment.

  GLIMPSES OF ETERNITY

  In the book The Art of Dying, authors Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick relate the following: “The male patient asked us to stand one on each side of him because he wanted to thank us for looking after him. He then looked over my shoulder towards the window and said, ‘Hang on, I will be with you in a minute, I just want to thank these nurses for looking after me.’ The patient repeated himself a couple of times, then he died.”1

  Thomas Edison’s last words, as he emerged briefly from a coma, were, “It is very beautiful over there.” And legend has it that as he was dying, Beethoven said, “I shall hear in heaven!”

  My favorite story just happened in the fall of last year, when Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, died. According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, in his last few interviews with Steve Jobs, this man who created beauty out of technology had become increasingly interested in God and life after death. In a striking eulogy written by his sister, Mona Simpson, she tells about his last hours, how he gathered his beloved family around him as he slowly slipped away. Before embarking on his final journey, she said, he looked for a long time at his wife, then at each of his children. Then he looked past them, over their shoulders, and said, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”2

  The unseen world. It’s part of the stories I tell and it is part of your own story as well, if only you will have eyes to see. “Yet the LORD hath not given you a heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day” (Deut. 29:4 KJV).

  We need to be willing to squint into the sunlight and catch glimmers of mystery and wonder. And when we are telling our own stories we need not shy away from the miracles.

  Storytelling Prompt

  Are you ever aware of the unseen world around you? Does God seem real to you or are you just catching glimmers of Him? Do you have God incidents to add to your story?

  Catching Glimmers

  In our modern world, we practically worship science. We expect the world to be explained, cataloged, and viewed in concrete terms. Black-and-white terms. Legal analysts tell us that these days it is more difficult than ever to get a conviction based on circumstantial evidence. Juries have watched far too many episodes of CSI and expect concrete evidence—DNA, surveillance tapes, blood spatter analysis. Solid proof. There’s no room for nonscientific evidence.

  G. K. Chesterton, the much-acclaimed twentieth-century British writer, spent many years exploring the clash of science and religion. He concluded that though those who avidly practiced science—the materialists—were entirely logical in their strict belief system, in which they explained everything with natural events, the fact that they couldn’t allow for the possibility of the tiniest miracle locked them into a disbelief that would not allow for exploration and observation. He wrote that orthodox Christians were freer because they could believe in both natural and supernatural causes for events.

  Too many people try to take our stories and apply the same standard of science and logic, but in our hearts, we know there is more. We long to catch glimmers of the divine in our books as well as in the stories of our lives. As I write my books, I want the stories to be logical, but at the same time I hope to capture a bit of the divine—just like in real life.

  Thirteen

  TROUBLE WAS BOUND TO COME . . .

  I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.

  —JOHN 16:33

  Remember the 1957 Meredith Willson musical The Music Man? One of the more popular songs sung by Professor Harold Hill was “Ya Got Trouble.” That trouble in River City was the centerpiece of the plot. Had the professor not convinced the good citizens that they had trouble that needed to be addressed, trouble that would lead their youngsters down the slippery slope to ruin, none of the townspeople would have been int
erested in purchasing musical instruments for their children.

  Character grows when there is conflict. Plot grows out of trouble. No conflict? No story. It’s true when I write stories, but it’s just as true in our own lives.

  Trouble. It’s something we generally want to avoid at all costs. But the truth is that trouble is our lot in life. Chris Tiegreen, in his book The One Year Walk with God Devotional, quotes Warren Wiersbe as saying, “The Christian life is not a playground; it is a battleground.”1

  DEVELOPING CONFLICT

  In my novels, one of the most important things I must do is develop conflict. To do this, I look at my characters and figure out two things: their deepest longings and their biggest fears. In chapter 11, I talked about the plot for my book The Shop on Blossom Street. The characters in the knitting class all have stories and conflicts that give rise to trouble. Remember the young Alix Townsend, who took the rap for the drugs her roommate hid in her purse? Her deepest longing is to have a “normal” life like the other ladies in her knitting class. She’s afraid of drugs, having seen how they devastated her family. Coming into contact with drugs again was her biggest fear. So bearing the false accusation of drug possession sets her up for conflict. It plays on her worst fears and puts her longing—to be accepted by “normal” people—even farther out of reach.

  Jacqueline Donovan is a socialite who’s spent years dreaming of the perfect life and the perfect wife for her only son, Paul. Her greatest fear is somehow losing him. So when he falls in love with the down-home Tammie Lee, a Southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks, conflict is inevitable.

  The third person in the class, Carol Girard, longs for a child. After trying unsuccessfully for so long, her greatest fear is that she won’t be able to get pregnant. As she begins to knit her baby blanket we sense her intense baby hunger.

  Three women who long for something they don’t have and whose greatest fears seem to be coming true. It’s the perfect setup for a story. Conflict builds characters and characters build conflict.

  Life is not unlike fiction. In fact, soon after I wrote about Carol’s inability to conceive, my son Dale and his wife, Laurie, began that same journey to overcome infertility. It was a long, frustrating road, with six IVF attempts. Every time we cuddle the now-two-year-old Jaxon, we are reminded that good things—precious things—come out of trouble.

  OPPORTUNITY GROWS OUT OF TROUBLE

  Someone once told me that the Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters—the one for danger and the one for opportunity. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

  We long for a calm life. How often have you wished everything would “settle down”? I have many a friend who’s expressed a longing for quiet and uneventful family gatherings at Christmas or other holidays. As one of my friends says, “My extended family puts the fun in dysfunctional.” But you can bet that her family is ever changing, hopefully growing stronger and closer as they meet each challenge and recommit to each other. Where there is potential conflict, there is potential for great growth. It’s an opportunity. Exciting challenges do not grow out of a calm existence.

  TO BE REDEEMED

  In his book Soulprint, Mark Batterson says, “Trouble ought to come with a footnote in fine print, ‘to be redeemed.’ ”2 He talks about how the longer he lives, the more he has come to see that disappointments in life are often divine appointments. Trouble may just be a delay in all that the Lord has for us.

  I’m beginning to believe I’m an expert on trouble. Earlier this year, after suffering the greatest loss of my life when we buried our son Dale, I underwent what should have been a simple surgery and ended up with complications that landed me in the intensive care unit for seven days. I was home only a few days before Wayne fell, breaking his arm in two places and tearing his rotator cuff, which required surgery. It felt as though things could not have gotten much worse, but that was before I came down with a severe case of shingles. In my pain and frustration I complained to God that I was beginning to feel like Job of the Old Testament. No sooner had I uttered the words than I seemed to hear the Lord saying to me, “But Debbie, don’t lose sight of the blessings that followed.” I grabbed my Bible and there it was. In Job 42:10 it says, “After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before.” Skipping down to verse 12, it says, “The LORD blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part.” I knew then that the Lord would bless me . . . that He already had blessed me.

  RAISING THE STAKES

  To keep a story moving forward, sometimes the author has to raise the stakes. This device reminds me of the movie Speed. When a terrorist’s plan backfires, he rigs a ticking time bomb to a Los Angeles city bus. The bus must maintain a speed of at least fifty miles per hour to keep from exploding. Anyone who knows LA traffic, with its congestion and twists and turns, understands what an impossible task the terrorist has set for the hero. To further complicate things, if the LAPD tries to unload any passengers, the bomb will be detonated remotely. At each turn the stakes are higher until we are on the edges of our seats, pulling for the good guys.

  In our own stories we often see the stakes being raised as well. Haven’t there been times in your life when you felt as if you couldn’t bear one more thing? And what happens? One more thing. As we see the stakes being raised, we need to recognize God’s hand at work. Danger plus opportunity.

  INTERNAL COMPLICATIONS

  I know you’ve heard the words, “Well, she brought that on herself.” There’s no question that sometimes we complicate our own lives. There are people who are nothing short of chaos makers. If their lives are too smooth they’ll stir something up. These chaos makers can be great characters in a book, though not so much in our lives.

  But internal complications are a fact of life. You may have things that happened to you as a child that will forever impact your life. Those internal complications will shade your dealings with other people and will even color the way you see the world. Danger plus opportunity. Until you embrace the opportunity to deal with the complication—to take it before the Lord or to work it out in counseling—it will spell trouble for you.

  EXTERNAL COMPLICATIONS

  Internal complications—sometimes even trouble of our own making—are one thing, but what about those troubles that come to us through no fault of our own? I’ll never forget those years, early in our marriage, when our children were young, and we discovered that the land on which our house stood was toxic. Homes were vacated. Other families in our neighborhood were uprooted. When we had purchased our home we’d had no inkling of the trouble that lay just below the surface. Something had to be done. Eventually the city of Seattle made good and stepped forward to buy the homes, but there were many battles to be fought before that war was won.

  I also think about my friend Carol Kent, whose life changed forever when her twenty-five-year-old son, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a lieutenant in the navy with an impeccable military record, shot and killed his wife’s ex-husband, believing he was protecting his two stepdaughters from the risk of abuse. Her son—her only son—received a sentence of life in prison in Florida with no possibility of parole. Carol tells her story in her books When I Lay My Isaac Down and A New Kind of Normal.

  Carol Kent knows trouble, but here’s what she says:

  I’ve learned that God is close to the brokenhearted and He never wastes our sorrow. I’m continuing to experience a new kind of normal where I can make hope-filled choices based on His eternal truth. Every day I try to find one thing to be thankful for and it’s my goal to look around and do one tangible act of loving compassion for someone else who is walking a difficult path. I’m also learning that God gives us splashes of joy—and even laughter—in the middle of a difficult journey.3

  DEEPENING THE STORY

  Writers often speak about deepening the story. This is done by introducing complications that grow out of a rich inner life. That’s a great goal for
us as we live our lives and tell our stories. In order to rise to the challenge of trouble, we need to feed our inner lives. We read in the first chapter about the importance of listening to our lives and Socrates’ contention that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

  We will overcome trouble as we deepen our relationship with the Lord. And how do we deepen our relationship? The same way we do with our spouses, our friends, or our children. We spend quality time together.

  God tells us that in this world we will have trouble. It’s a given. What we do with those challenges is entirely up to us. Remember, without a crucifixion there would be no resurrection.

  Storytelling Prompt

  Describe a time when trouble knocked at your door. Looking back, do you see any redemption? Try to re-create a troubled or tense scene that you’ve never forgotten through the eyes of your child-self. Did you ever have a season when trouble just began piling up—one thing after another until you could hardly see your way out? What did it feel like when you were in the middle of that?

  Imagination

  When trouble comes, is it ever half as bad as we had imagined it? We often hear someone say a variation on the following: “I wish I could just get this awful thing over with. Imagining the outcome is killing me.”

  One of the skills we need to master in life is the management of our imagination. On one hand, we need to let it run free. It’s a powerful thing when used creatively. When we imagine what we can be or what we can accomplish, it becomes a great motivator. But when we dwell on the negative and spend our energy imagining the worst-case scenarios of our lives, imagination will defeat us.