pools of water

this is an excerpt, from "The Great Divorce" (by C.S. Lewis)... about eternity, free will, and time - and how both their connection and the individual comprehension of each rely fully on the hope and promise of Grace, alone.

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"... You cannot in your present state understand eternity. But you can get some likeness of it if you say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all the earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town (Earth), but all of their life there, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell.

That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for this', not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say, 'Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences' - little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.

Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here (Heaven) and the twilight turns to blackness down there (Earth), the Blessed will say 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven', and the Lost will say, 'We were always in Hell'... and both will speak truly.

And the Saved... what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts, memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water."

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this just really encouraged me...

it articulated a Truth very old and familiar, in a brilliant new way.

and now it has been passed on to you :) that's all for tonight.