Cornucopia / Cynthia Dewes

‘Yesh!’ What joys God has ready for us now and in eternal life

“Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, what God has ready for those who love him.” Indeed. We all look forward to the wonders which we hope to see in heaven. But there are many delights God gives us while we’re still on our journey.

Even Mutts, the cartoon kitty, understands this. In a recent comic strip marking the new year he noticed “another Sunday” and “another morning” which moved him to exclaim, “Yesh! Another unlike any other.” He appreciated the graces God has already given us.

As I’ve said many times before, Mutts is awed as I am by every sunset or snowfall I see. And he knows as I do that God’s gifts are all around us, just there for our pleasure and inspiration should we happen to look up.

They appear every day, and they can be small or large, mind-boggling or kind of ordinary. Perhaps we received good news on a dreaded doctor visit, or actually got to speak to a human being when trying to manage a problem on the phone. Or maybe someone just smiled at us as we passed them.

What God has ready for us can also vary from the strictly personal to a worldwide event. We can rejoice when our soldier husband, wife or brother comes home from serving in war, but we also rejoice when the war ends, especially if our national cause is justified. We can happily recover from a serious illness like smallpox, and later be thrilled to learn that that particular illness has been virtually eliminated.

Then there are the emotional events that defy categorizing. One such happened in our family this Christmas. It even moved a less religious child to say the hand of God must be in it.

Our daughter came from Germany for a week’s visit during the holiday. She’d not celebrated Christmas with us for 40 years, she said, so it was about time. Then a son and his wife arrived the same day to pick up a truck they’d purchased online. Finally, still another son realized he had time off from work so he came as well. Our local son and his wife joined the group, and the next day our widowed daughter-in-law completed the roster of the visit.

This was probably the first time we’d been together with all of our living children in anyone’s memory. Not only that, but we were not distracted by the presence of grandchildren or “greats’’ or other relatives, much as we love them and enjoy their company. For a few days, we were in a kind of time warp in which we were all younger and nostalgia reigned.

Of course, hindsight is always better, but we laughed ourselves sick thinking about the good times. We itemized the numerous cars which made our yard look like a used car lot, and the despair of the brothers trying to teach their sister to drive at least one of them. We were naughtily gleeful remembering how irate a neighbor became when a couple of the boys burned rubber on the street in front of his house one evening.

God loves us as we love our children, and showers us with gifts. So, when we consider what God has ready for us in this life and in eternal life, we must join Mutts in an affirming “Yesh!”
 

(Cynthia Dewes, a member of St. Paul the Apostle Parish in Greencastle, is a regular columnist for The Criterion.) †