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

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.

William Blake

Like Molly, the British novelist Philip Toynbee began to see only after he was diagnosed with cancer. "I stopped several times," he wrote in his journal after a walk, "and looked at a single tree as I have never done in my life before. Intense happiness."

A month before he died, he wrote, "Wet leaves of sycamore after a heavy shower, and the sun glittering on them ... Such things I now look at with renewed intensity and happiness - not because I may not see them for much longer, but because they are of immediate significance: almost direct manifestations of heavenly light."

The sacred in the commonplace... Corrie ten Boom was another who "took off her shoes." Corrie could detect heaven in the grimmest places! In fact, the book John and I wrote with her, which we titled The Hiding Place, in some foreign editions was called Heaven in Hell.

Having experienced the depths of human brutality in a Nazi concentration camp, and having detected heaven even there, Corrie forever after looked for - and found - heaven wherever she was.

I went with her once to Scheveningen Prison in Holland, where she spent the first weeks after her arrest for the "crime" of sheltering Jews. With liberation, Scheveningen had reverted to its prewar function as a men's penitentiary, and Corrie was often invited there as a chapel speaker.

"I love talking to these men!" she said as we waited just inside the formidable gates of this maximum security facility "I tell them, the gates of this prison are locked and bolted, but the gate of heaven is open wide!"