Heaven ...

... stopped by my house on Saturday.

You wouldn't know it to look at it. But it did.

When Jesus walked the earth on two legs, he did a lot of talking about heaven. Except that he called it the kingdom of God. In the roughly 2,000 years since then there's been a lot of speculation about what he meant and lots of denominational strife about it too. But if you read the Bible and read what Jesus had to say about the kingdom of God, I think you'll agree it stopped by my house on Saturday. But you wouldn't know it to look at it now. Here's what happened.

As most of you know, I was down at the beach in North Carolina. So, for me this started with a phone call from the woman who was looking after our pets in our absence. She had come over to move them out of the way for some other (mutual friends) who were moving some of their stuff into an unfinished storage room in our basement. When she opened the door to the basement our dog, Sam, went running ahead of her (he loves the basement for some silly reason). And when he got to the bottom of the stairs, she heard splashing. It's never good to hear splashing when you are inside a house, unless you're in a bathroom or a kitchen. But when you're nearing a basement ... it's bad. I've neglected to tell you that at this point it had been raining for about 18 hours, and raining hard. The remnants of a hurricane had hit the mid-Atlantic seaboard after a long summer drought. And apparently the sump pump which normally keeps our basement nice and dry, had failed. But we didn't notice it, because there had been nothing for it to pump for the last two months. By the time she got down there, there were about two inches of water in our basement. Our floating floor was really and truly floating! And so were LightHusband's rope-tension snare drums and my boxes of fabric. Fortunately, the fabric was in plastic boxes and the snare drums are parade drums and are made to take the wet. So most of the stuff (and it is ... just **stuff**) is fine and what isn't can be fixed. There are some toys from the playroom that will have to be thrown away and some furniture too. Some computer equipment from his office is ruined. But none of it is irreplaceable.

Here's how heaven (or the kingdom of God) was here. Through some (call it coincidence, divine intervention, whatever you will) happy circumstance our friends were already on their way here when this discovery was made. The discovery was made when the water was only two inches deep instead of six or eight and waited til we got home Sunday afternoon. And those friends marked the spot that the water came to, pulled our stuff out of the water and carried it out of harm's way, mourned with us, laughed with us, cared with us, propped us up, and carried us through and will continue to carry us. And these friends were moving other people. This was not the only item on the day's agenda. There was still the back-breaking, heart-wrenching move to accomplish.

So ... to my AwakeFriend and his beautiful wife, my BrickFriend, PureGold, the StoryTeller, GreenGrass, P3T3, LinusLetters and everyone else who was here ... helping with the move and helping with the flood, and to my friends at the beach who helped me to see that I can get through this and do my regular life too ... you carry God's kingdom in your hearts, you are a lamp that shines on a hill, and you brought heaven to my house on Saturday and peace of mind to my heart for always. Thank you.