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

The Church blesses some things, not because some things are holy and others are not, but so that we will know that everything is holy.

David M. Allen

I've been in heaven all along, I know now, only the signposts that could tell me where I was were written in another language. I thought heaven came when problems were behind me. But the signs, as I've learned to read them, say heaven lies right in the middle of them.

I remember, years ago, arriving at 7:00 in the morning at the California home of Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale Evans. This was the time in our family when seven-year-old Scott spent ten minutes before the mirror each morning adjusting his cowboy hat and six-shooters to match the photo of Roy on his wall. I'd come west with a Roy Rogers songbook and a dozen reminders from Scott to ask Roy to sign it.

It wasn't Roy I'd come to see, though. I was there to interview Dale on a subject seldom discussed in the 1950s: how to mix career and family - seven children in Dale's case! I wanted answers not merely as a reporter but for myself. I had only three children, and work I could do for the most part at home, but still felt tugged in many directions. Here at last was someone with experience. I'd heard that strength for Dale's many-sided life came from daily prayer. When? I intended to ask. How did she ever find the time?

The door of the rambling ranch house was opened by a teenage girl. "I can't find my gym shoes!" she wailed.

As I stepped inside, a plastic airplane sailed past my knees, followed by a tow-headed boy in blue pajamas. "Mom's in the bathroom," he said.

Dale had asked me to come at this early hour because she and Roy had a recording session later that morning. I found her dabbing a piece of cotton on the mouth of a sobbing five-year-old. "Debbie cut her lip on the washstand," she said.

The little girl comforted, Dale looked at her watch and sprinted for the kitchen. While she cracked eggs into a bowl and fed slices of bread into a toaster, I poured orange juice into a row of glasses lining the counter.

"Sandy!" to the youngster in pajamas, "why aren't you dressed?"

"Because Dusty has my pants."

And so it went as children appeared, ate, dashed out the door. It was like a whole week of crises at our house - the missing note for school, the juice spilled on the only clean shirt, the scuffle that the other one started. And in the midst of it all, Roy's voice from somewhere in the back of the house, where the phone had been ringing nonstop. "It's the studio. Can we come an hour earlier?"