Driving Down Memory Lane

When I was a girl in the 1970's, numerous siblings crammed into our family car for hours to literally drive over the river and through the woods to grandma's house. Back in the time before car seats and even rear seat belts, let alone iPods and portable / built-in DVD players, my family played games like "I-Spy," "Geography" (where you name a place that began with the last letter of the previous place name), "Traffic Bingo" and one of my dad's favorites -- "Spot the Straightaway."

While I now understand it to be urban legend, my dad explained that President Eisenhower designed the US Highway System to have a mile-long straightaway without overpasses "every so many-miles down the highway," so a plane could make an emergency landing. While easy in flat open sections of the mid-west, we lived in the Northeastern US, where highways built in the 1950's and 1960's meandered around existing cities and large towns, as well as wove through rolling hills and mountains.

But if we were quiet (hint-hint) and observant, we would be able to find those mile-long stretches. As a reward, the observer would get a window-seat at the next pit stop change. Having been crammed in the middle of the bench seats (front and back), we all knew the value of the prized window seats.

Two weeks ago, a small plane landed on a normally crowded New York City highway. This is not the first time; this will not be the last time. But when I heard about it, I smiled and remembered the "Spot the Straightaway" game of my youth ~ years after my dad, and now one of my siblings, passed away.

The reason I share this particular drive down memory lane is this:

• Share the time we have with each other, we never know when someone will no longer be in our lives.
• Even when we don't realize it, life's trials and tragedies shape us -- like a highway cutting straight along mountainous terrain -- to prepare us for future emergencies.
• Be observant; while the US didn't intentionally plan emergency straightaways, God does. There may be crisis in our lives, but God opens up a place for emergency landings too.

~ ESA

Heaven (True Story)

The below post was written in my journal over two decades ago - exactly as you see it. My writing skills weren't as developed, and it was never polished for publication; it's simply something I wrote in my journal to describe what happened to me that day.

I thought it would be something nice to share with you today.

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4/20/87

I sit outside in the sunshine on this warm spring day. I watch the sun sink slowly below the horizon from the top of a steep hill. I look into the sky where the clouds camaflage themselves to match the sunset. Tonight one cloud suspends over the sun.

The bottom of this cumulous cloud takes on no other color I've seen before: pink. But so soft a pink it looks like cotton candy, but not sticky. I guess it would be more like cotton then.

Then the tremendous view rose from there. Around the outside edges of the cloud, there is a billowing formation soft and cottony like. But the center wasn't as defined as the edges. The center was blended together smoothly. It varied in colors that we[re] constantly swirling. I saw greens, blues, purples, pinks, reds, yellows, oranges, browns, and white. But there was no black. No darkness existed whatsoever within that cloud. If I watched the center for a few minutes I began to see things. Places that I'd never think I would see, but places that I wanted to see so much.

Someone came up from behind me and sat down beside me on the hill. He looked at me and at the cloud I was watching. The clould that was beyond my description, because it was so beautiful. Then, this person pointed at the cloud and remarqued about its beauty. I nodded still looking at the cloud. Then the person told me that what the sight was wasn't just a cloud, but the outside of heaven. I turned around to look at this person, but he was nowhere in sight now. Strange. Then I turned my eyes back toward the sky to see the last of the cloud fading into nothing.

Next, I thought of the cloud and what the person had said. Then, I thought to myself if that was what heaven was like on the outside. It must be unimaginable on the inside.

- TM
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- ESA