A Beginning....

It's hard to know where to begin a blog. So I'm not going to try. I think life is better when it's simpler.

Today, I've had a recurring thought, brought about by one of my favorite sounds: a Cessna engine. When I was a little girl, I practically lived on the beach. Boogie-boarding, building sand castles, playing mermaids, and swimming until my fingers and toes turned blue. My favorite pastime was to race out of the water, roll in the hot sand, and stare up at the sky, waiting for the planes. They would arrive, many times in a long line, with beautiful advertisements flowing behind them, in all sorts of bright colors. I would lay there hours, watching the planes fly by, never forgetting that distinct sound of the engine drone.

Today, I've heard a few planes fly overhead, and my mind has rushed back to those long, sun-filled days at the beach. I wish I was there, without a care or worry. Just sand, sun, water, and time.

This longing is no accident. I've experienced it before: during a great party, around the Christmas tree with family, even just listening to a beautiful song. C.S. Lewis describes this feeling when he describes Heaven:

"We cannot name it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

That's it. A little gift from God, given freely through a simple sound. My memories, those longings, are a tiny glimpse into the reality of eternity, and Heaven. I cannot wait.