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

Even the hard roads, the steep, thorny stretches, they too lead home.

There let the way appear steps unto heaven,
All that thou sendest me in mercy given.

When Sarah Flower Adams wrote these lines of her best-loved hymn, "Nearer My God to Thee," she was ill with the disease that would take her life at age forty-three. Orphaned at five, forced at thirty-two to give up a brilliant acting career because of poor health, she could nevertheless see "all" that befell her as the pathway to heaven laid by a loving God.

Francis Thompson, too -- part of whose wrenching autobiographical poem opens the section Heaven Behind Me -- led a tragic life by any measure. Sick, destitute, addicted to opium, in The Hound of Heaven he recounts his self-destructive flight from God. By the end of the painful story he has become "of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot."

Then God speaks. And what God says, at the conclusion of the long poem, is very like what Sarah Adams heard:

All which I took from thee, I did but take
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou mightst seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come!

One cannot be lost.

If my parents never talked about religion, there was one family member who did --emphatically, as he did everything. Grandfather Schindler, whose portrait hangs beside Grandmother's in our living room, was a Unitarian minister with a prophet's fire. I remember my brother and me tugging desperately on his arms in a Toronto movie house, trying to get him to stand up for "God Save the King."

"I'll not rise for a king!" Grandfather trumpeted in his pulpit-trained voice as everyone turned to stare. "God save our freedoms and kings be d-----d!"

Then in his mid eighties, he'd retired from the ministry and now worked occasionally for Daddy "The world's oldest detective," said the entry about him in Ripley's Believe It or Not. An old man with a white goatee and a shiny bald head, Grandfather could sit in the lobby of a hotel, apparently dozing in a chair, and take in everything that went on. With the invisibility of the elderly and a memory like a tape recorder, he was the perfect undercover agent.

In his own profession of reforming preacher, however, he'd been less successful. Daddy's principal childhood memory, he used to say, was of moving. Grandfather was hopelessly idealistic, hopelessly ahead of his time. If a thing was morally wrong, no