Sight Unseen

"This is one birthday she'll never forget," I said after visiting our soon to be eight-year-old granddaughter at the hospital. She had been hurt on a four-wheeler and had to have her leg put into a cast today by an orthopedic surgeon. We were getting a bite to eat after leaving her room as she was readying to go home.

"I don't remember my eighth birthday," I said, "but I do remember being eight!" One reason I remember that age is because that's when I had chicken pox!

"Well, I remember my eighth birthday," my husband mused. "Or was it my ninth. Anyway, I sat on the porch all day waiting for the mailman to bring something my mother had ordered for me from Montgomery Ward catalog--a pocket watch!" He said he treasured the watch for years.

Ordering things through the mail was evidently a frequent and favorite activity of his as a boy. He has told of sending away for spy rings, secret codes and other prizes kids treasured back then. The funny thing is, he is still doing that today! Ever so often, something will come addressed to Howard, and to my question, "What have your ordered this time?" he usually says, "I don't remember ordering that!" as he unwraps a pen, notebook, or some gimmick from a credit card company.

The few times I have ordered things from a catalog I have been disappointed. I would much rather buy something in person, especially clothes, which never fit otherwise! Sometimes even the color of an item is wrong, not looking the same shade as the illustration. And objects that are so appealing in the offer are nearly always smaller than they look in the picture.

As our birthdays are reaching ever greater heights, we find ourselves thinking more about heaven. What will it be like? Our imaginations fail us as we try to comprehend our heavenly home. I Corinthians 2:9 tells us, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

Trying to visualize heaven is like an unborn baby trying to imagine what life outside the womb would be like. Like the song says, "I can only imagine." We are not told much about heaven, but we infer from David's words when his child died that loved ones are there. He said as recorded in 2 Samuel 12:23, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me."

Jesus promises in John 14:2-3, "...I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also." That is all we really need to know, for we can trust the Bible, the letter written to us from God, who does not do false advertising!