and I’m thinking about my brother now gone from this world, can it be, for nearly four years? The little boy who shared a room with me. The handsome football captain. The father. The friend. The smile and a thousand images still inside me.
What I see in bread and wine transformed he sees face to face. What I envision only with the eyes of faith is as tangible to him as the recliner on which I am sitting. I know someone, not simply a Saint from times past but someone who breathed my air, who has seen Jesus, who sees Him as routinely as I see the people at work. Someone who lives in unclouded communion. Someone with no sleepless nights, in fact no night at all.
Time rushes on. The world is crazier than usual these days. People’s hearts, my heart, can grow faint. I wonder, in my own selfish way, why God is waiting even as I understand that time is mercy for both me and the world. Yet what must it be like to rest, not for a few fleeting hours but beyond time, beyond care, beyond everything that claws at us even as we seek to ascend?
For now I am here in time. I bear its marks. I seek as best I can to redeem the moments I have been given. There is joy here. There is love here. There is happiness here. Yet how wonderful it must be to know these things with undimmed perception, in whole and not in part!
Some day. Until then my times are in God’s hands.
Thank you for sharing these insights. May your brother’s memory be eternal.