As I sit here tonight my heart is sad. My Aunt Edna is going to be with Jesus very soon, they said it would likely be tonight. It’s an odd thing to know really, that someone will be leaving this earth. I know it happens every second but it’s not someone I know every second. I am not sad for her at all. She will be with Jesus. That is a really mind blowing thought. Any moment now Jesus will call her home and she will see him for the first time. What must that be like? I can’t imagine. I can’t even describe the feelings I have about it right now, it’s just odd. To know that such a monumental thing in her life will happen at any moment is interesting. It’s like I have a portal open to heaven and this person who I have known my whole life will soon see Jesus. It’s like a part of me is there experiencing that with her. And I think about the day that will come all too soon when I will be where she is, at the doorstep of heaven. Waiting to cross over into real life. This we have on earth is just shadows of things to come in heaven. She is going to see real life while I will continue to live in the shadowlands. She is about to experience that moment where Jesus welcomes her in and she will live forever. She will trade her cancer ridden body for a beautiful and perfect vessel. She will see her mother and father and brother who have gone before her. I can’t imagine what that will be like. They haven’t all been together since she was 16. That seems like an eternity here on earth, but to them in heaven it was but a blink of an eye. It is a miraculous thing to be present at the beginning and end of someone’s life. As an adult I have experienced it a few times now, births and deaths of loved ones. You never realize the gravity of it until you experience it. It’s like heaven touches earth briefly.

Tonight I will sit and eat dinner and put the kids to bed and distract myself with TV and in the morning when I wake up my Aunt may not be a resident of earth any longer. It’s just such a big thing. She has lived a long and good life. I am thrilled for her that she gets this rest. I long for the day when I will join her, but it just seems so unreal at times until you get close to it like this. We live our lives in the monotony of ordinary and don’t think enough about what lies just beyond the vale of heaven, where real life is. It just brings so much perspective to this life’s trivialities. It just doesn’t matter, none of it. What matters is heaven and souls and eternal life. What matters is eternity.