The Secret

continued

stricken over the failures of the church, Catherine fell ill with what may have been infantile paralysis, and after weeks of agony, she died at the age of thirty-three.

A tragic life? On the contrary, said Catherine, her life was heaven on earth. "All the way to heaven is heaven," she declared, "for he said, 'I am the Way'"

It wasn't some carefree soul basking in good fortune who reached this happy conclusion. It was a traveler on a hard and uphill road, who found that the journey with Jesus was heaven, whatever the outward circumstances.

Catherine's secret was to see her life as a love story To receive each hour of each day, no matter how thankless and hard, as the perfect gift of the perfect Lover.

What if I could learn to do that! I think as I follow her steps through Siena's winding alleys. For since I encountered St. Catherine, I've met others, people living in today's world, who have. Who've learned to see in the particulars of their lives, even in pain and loss, God's very personal wooing.

For fifty years, through books and through articles for Guideposts magazine, I've enjoyed seeking out and relating these true romances. Anyone's but my own. I've shied away from telling my own love story, excusing myself because I'm a "private person." What's to tell, anyway? Once when my husband, John, and I were living in England, a local paper ran a series on "A Day in the Life." A day in the life of a Queen's Guardsman. A day in the life of a Schoolteacher. A reporter interviewed me for A day in the life of a Writer -- surely of all daily routines the dullest:

8:10 sit at desk
9:15 put on another pot of coffee
10:12 re-sharpen pencils
11:26 cross out everything written since 8:10

My work, it's true, has allowed me to meet people -- some famous, some little known -- with gripping stories to tell. Some of these are in this book. But suppose God wants us to tell the everyday stories too! Nothing is more important, writes Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets, "than that we keep track, you and I, of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way, because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity that God makes himself known most powerfully and personally."

God making himself known. . . Perhaps this is the purpose of our separate stories in their endless variety Perhaps heaven is where we will recount, each to the other, millions and billions of us, the story of our individual journey to that kingdom and what we learned of the King along the way.

The story of my particular journey began, as I suspect most do, long before I knew I was on a journey at all. Least of all did I know its destination. It's only looking back that I can make out the way I've come and see that all along, the way was Jesus.       <<< end