See You in Heaven (Gabrielle)
July 2, 2007 by Gabrielle
Thursday night we discovered the outside lock on our van’s side door was missing. No problem, we thought, We’ll just reached around the side from the front and unlock it that way. But then Sunday when we arrived at church I discovered I was locked into the back. The door was locked and jammed. The kids and I crawled out the front door and went in to church. Seth said we would deal with it later.
Well, God revealed Himself yet again to be cooler and weirder than I would ever think because He provided a solution to the problem that I would never have thought of. A family from New Zealand, the Stuarts, just happened to be spending three months touring the U.S. in a RV and just happened to be worshiping with us that day and Mr. Stuart just happens to be a locksmith. Seth went up to him during lunch and asked if he would mind breaking into our van for us. He very kindly did and fixed the problem and everything. And he, his wife and their seven children (six girls, one boy) came to our house for the evening.
It felt like how my father keeps talking about Heaven. You’re going about your business, you bump into another person you have Christ in common with and then you sit down, have a cup of coffee and talk. About life, about God, about your families and about where you’ve been and where you’re going. We didn’t even have the same accent or live on the same side of the Equator and we found we had so much in common. Living in less than desirable houses and what you found you take for granted was one conversation. They won that exchange, by the way. I started off talking about my bedroom door and they told us about the time they were without outside walls. We decided they won hands down.
We ate together, we laughed together and we talked together about anything that came up. The children had a blast playing in the pool and sitting on top of the Stuarts RV. Towards the end of the evening Seth found their house on Google Earth and they showed us around their town. Isaac wanted to know how far it was to their house and Google Earth reports it is 8000 miles, 13,000 kilometers and 7.6 million smoots.
When it was time for them to go Mrs. Stuart said, “Maybe we’ll see you all again sometime. And if not here then we’ll see you in Heaven.” See you in Heaven. It was the perfect goodbye.
Correction – Pastor Ben-Ezra does not refer to just any coffe, but STARBUCKS coffee. I think he’s wrong on this point, though. I’m a tea drinker.
Without outside walls around their bathroom. That’s the important bit right there.
Without walls around the bathroom doesn’t bother me. When I was growing up, we had 6 people, one bathroom and for a few years, no bathroom door.