"Through the Looking Glass........."

I drove Beth to her appointment with the doctor Monday afternoon, the office located within the newest branch of the local hospital and situated just off the expressway in downtown Covington. Twelfth Street has been transformed into a four-lane thoroughfare, the whole immediate area around that winding road leading back to the front entrance refreshed in its appearance, and as this particular part of the inner city of Covington was home to me for more than a decade back in the late 40s, early 50s, I asked my about-to-turn-thirteen granddaughter, McKenna, if she wanted to drive down “memory lane” with me. It only took a few minutes. The inside of the old Lutheran church remains mentally photographed: the room where we gathered before Sunday school, the second floor sanctuary with its huge pipe organ, the choir loft, and even the crimson color of the carpet on the staircases leading to the balcony. The outside, while wearing a sign attesting to such history, also has another one declaring the building now utilized by a different body of believers. The bricks were faded. If the stained glass windows were still there, I missed them. It was like seeing a ghost, the structure yet there, but the image faded, not quite the same as the picture contained in my brain. Four or five blocks away, we turned beneath the railroad overpass, moving slowly down what once was my life. Pershing Avenue had always been a one-way, narrow, cobble-stoned residential street connecting with Main, my grandfather’s house where we occupied the second floor positioned midway on the left, a small garage on either side affording a good place for kids to play dodge ball. What seemed to me in childhood a long spacious stretch from one end to the other, a world of its own where children jumped rope, chased each other in various games, bicycled, roller-skated, and knew everyone else’s yard almost as well as you knew your own… now looked shrunk, as if its spirit was gone, no evidence of people anywhere and the homes squeezed together, the length of it traversed much too soon for the picture of it still held in an old man’s mind. Time is an illusion, an ocean through which we pass. I find it very possible that God has a DVD of it and can step into any section of it whenever He wishes. We can, too, but only via this foggy imprint retained within, the tangible also perishable and the eternal a matter of possessing it in Him. I may not understand it; but I can know it in my belly even as I know yesterday in my head…..